Innocents affected by this

dopester

Unprecedented numbers of government employees will be fired. Civil service pay will be slashed. There will be widespread privatisation of government services. Able employees will favour privatisation over any objections of their unions as with the shrinking and increased efficiency of the public sector the easier it is to bring its pay up to market levels.

chimp_choker

dopester wrote: »

Services like ironing ladies come to the market when incomes rise (or easy money is available via cheap credit / MEW ect) because the opportunity costs of doing certain things for yourself, like fixing a meal or ironing shirts, rises even more.

When you are earning good money, household and personal chores can be pushed on to the open market because it economises your valuable time. You can eat out in nice restaurants as it can be cheaper to do so on your "time-rate" to pay someone else to to prepare, cook, serve and clean up afterwards.

When the downturn comes and your income is squeezed harder, or you lose your job, you can iron your own shirts and quickly heat up some soup with a quick and easy to make cheese toastie.

I've said it many times on here when I had my own sucessful business I used to hire a helecopter to go to a league 1 football match..... ok I took the family as well but it was as it was. Then the banks pulled the plug, I lost the business, nearly became bancrupt and couldn't even afford the £3.99 to listen to the match on the internet let alone see it live. I also became seriously ill, got a second chance on that one then for 4 days we had no food in the cupboard and not one penny in the bank ( creditors took it all). After that I even scrounged food out of Mr T's waste bins ( have you seen what they throw away?? ) and off compost heaps at my local allotments but I didn't regret living to my means when I had it all. ( I won't be doing it again though).
My wife stood by me and now 3 years on I'm still here... which is a good thing, My son is doing well at Uni and our food budget for 3 of us is well less than £160 a month. At a real hard push we can get it down to under £100 but it is a bit dire.

we don't have much, I got a "dad rocks" cup for fathers day but we are happy, wiser and wealthier all be it holistically and not monitarilly.

Sh*t happens and when it does you either give in or you fight for what you want and use the skills you have or make so the down turn is just a way of giving us normal people a kicking to keep us in our places and remember to be subservient to the bosses or the rich but if we all look at the basic things we need such as shelter food and love and aim to have them over all other things we will weather this storm and smile on the other side....

neverdespairgirl

PasturesNew wrote: »

I've got as qualified as I could ever be without any spare funds and without access to education.

Did you not fancy going to uni?

dopester

That story sounds a bit far fetched in places chimp choker, especially the scrounging food and compost bit.

Although I've just done a search for "helicopter" in your history and you do recount that tale back in March. If it's even half-true then that seems quite a journey you've been on.

chimp_choker wrote: »

I agree totally. Don't knock yourself up for being on here and being in a different position to most.
If I'd been on here about 10 years ago when I had credit cards with over £200,000 limits, driving fast cars and going to football matches ... IN A HELICOPTER then I probably wouldn't be in the mess i'm in today. If the majority of young people behave like you and my son then the banks will be worried but I don't think they will worry as all young uns are not as sensible as you and my son.... he's seen the mess i'm in so that is a salutary lesson for him.

Sapphire

dopester wrote: »

Unprecedented numbers of government employees will be fired. Civil service pay will be slashed. There will be widespread privatisation of government services. Able employees will favour privatisation over any objections of their unions as with the shrinking and increased efficiency of the public sector the easier it is to bring its pay up to market levels.

I think all that building work for the Olympics should be cancelled. The thing is spiralling out of control and is going to incur huge costs to the taxpayer (and I don't mean the wealthy, who seem to get away with paying very low tax). This at a bleak time for the forseeable future, when we really, really can do without such costs (and for little potential gain as far as I can see). :eek:

dopester

And for those who do not share my prediction of extreme cuts in the public sector, check out this Telegraph article of 2004, which gives a reading into the public sector jobs created under Labour (+ presumably the predicted 360,000 bureaucrats (approx) have been added to the payroll to where we are in the current time.)

The mega boom is deflating now and if you're not giving value, or have a ridiculous job you have to be fired. Radical reform is needed and radical reform will be taken.

Since 1997, the public sector workforce has grown by no less than 500,000, yet only 131,000 of these new recruits were doctors, nurses, teachers and police officers. And the Government's own figures show that another 360,000 are to be hired by 2008, the majority of them again likely to be administrators.

Government talk about "front-line services" is more empty propaganda. The police, NHS and local government are just as filled with bureaucracy as the central Civil Service, squandering billions of increased funding from the Treasury.

In education, for example, a third of all the state money aimed at primary and secondary schools is grabbed by town hall administrators before it ever reaches headteachers. The emphasis on procedures means that council inspections now swallow more than £1 billion a year.

Other funds are spent, not on meeting real public needs, but on recruiting an army of well-paid officials to impose the fashionable dogmas of equality and diversity. Among the publicly subsidised posts advertised last week were a "Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Community Worker" in Southwark, on a salary of up to £30,267, a "Doctrine Developer', on £35,190, at the National Centre for Policing Excellence, and a "Head of the Awareness and Involvement Unit" at Scottish Natural Heritage, on £33,136.

With no clear service to perform, so many state bureaucracies create pointless hierarchies to justify their own existences and create the illusion of importance. A classic example of this disastrous approach can be seen in the recently established regional development agencies, which spend £1.8 billion of taxpayers' money on self-generating, paper-shuffling activities.

At the East of England Development Agency, for instance, the management team includes a chief executive, a director of communications, a director of enterprise and innovation, a director of organisation and development, a director of sustainable development, and a head of policy. Not content with this, the organisation is currently advertising for a director general of operations and a director general, development.

The public sector needs radical reform, not more tinkering at the edges. That is what Sir Peter Gershon recommended in his recent efficiency review of the public sector from which Mr Brown plucked the figure of 104,000 job cuts. But Sir Peter went far further than mere redundancies, arguing that public bodies should adopt a far more flexible, entrepreneurial outlook, one geared to achieving real value for money. In practice, this would require an aggressive re-engineering of the state's entire operations and structures, the kind of drastic changes regularly carried out by US corporations to meet new challenges.

dopester

Sapphire wrote: »

I think all that building work for the Olympics should be cancelled. The thing is spiralling out of control and is going to incur huge costs to the taxpayer (and I don't mean the wealthy, who seem to get away with paying very low tax). This at a bleak time for the forseeable future, when we really, really can do without such costs (and for little potential gain as far as I can see). :eek:

Do you think we'll really be in any position to host the Olympics in 2012?

I've got big doubts. Public services around the UK like libraries, recreation and the arts seem destined to be starved for funds way before that time.

PasturesNew

neverdespairgirl wrote: »

Did you not fancy going to uni?

It was the mid 70s, working class, female.
I didn't know what it was all about to be honest.

The careers teacher asked girls: secretary, nurse, hairdresser or work in a shop/factory?

Then you're out in the world of work and having to pay your way.

There was no careers fairs, consultations, information. No work experience. I knew very little of the world/jobs. I just thought you went out to work, worked hard, got promoted and everybody was the same. I had NO idea people earnt such different wages etc.

Living in a village in East Anglia in those times there was a very limited view of the world.

I was about 35 when I was helping somebody with CVs for a well paid job and everybody applying was my age and it was a £250k job. And I was gobsmacked... these people were my age and the only difference between them/me was they had a degree and had started off in good/top jobs right from the off.

It was only then that I found out what a degree was: a way to get to doing bigger/better jobs right from the start.

I had no idea. Registered with the OU straight away. Only got through half of that though before life was too distributed/changeable to keep it up (and I couldn't afford it).

PasturesNew

dopester wrote: »

Do you think we'll really be in any position to host the Olympics in 2012?

I've got big doubts. Public services around the UK like libraries, recreation and the arts seem destined to be starved for funds way before that time.

I never think about the Olympics, it might as well be in a different country for all I know about it.

In fact, if it weren't mentioned here I'd probably not even have been able to tell you it was being held in London in 2012 if I was on a quiz to win £1000.

neverdespairgirl

PasturesNew wrote: »

I had no idea. Registered with the OU straight away. Only got through half of that though before life was too distributed/changeable to keep it up (and I couldn't afford it).

Why not finish it now? You have the time, the money, and sure as hell, the brains.