Sorry to any regular readers for the lack of activity recently. I had planned to write somwthing last Saturday afternoon when my long-overdue day in the garden was to be curtailed by heavy showers. The problem is, we didn't get any, apart from one short-lived affair rather conveniently timed to coincide with our supper!
Anyway, Just to reassure you, I haven't gone into hibernation, and there's plenty to discuss, not least George Osborne, our Chancellor, who seems to be pleasing nobody at the moment. When New Labour were thankfully driven from power in 2010, top of the proiroty list for the incoming Coalition government was a return to sound public finances. The spending binges of Gordon Brown and Alastair Darling had left the government - well, the UK taxpayer, to be exact - with monumental debts. Public spending had to be brought down, we were told by George Osborne. It was going to be tough, but the country had been living beyond its means for far too long.
It's not just the left-wing media and the trade unions who have since been howling with rage at "government cutbacks" and criticisng Osbrone for his brutality. A few days ago, a copy of a railway periodical to which I subscribe arrived on my doormat with a lurid headline about the National Railway Museum in York. "NRM under threat," it proclaimed. "Museum could be closed in the wake of funding cuts." Inside were details of an on-line petition to save the NRM which readers were encouraged to sign, "to try to persuade Chancellor George Osborne to halt the absolutely unthinkable."
I haven't visited the NRM for many years, largely as I'm not a great traveller and York is a long way from Sussex where I used to live, and a still fair old hike from my present home in Gloucestershire. However, the NRM's collection isn't all housed at York, or even in a museum. Only last month, I spent a morning volunteering as a car park attendant at the nearby Gloucestershire-Warwickshire Railway, and one of the engines that visited the line for its special gala weekend was the NRM-owned "Schools" class No. 925 Cheltenham - an engine recently restored to working order while in the custody of the Mid-Hants Railway. It is good that so many fine engines have been preserved from the scrapyard, although whether it is the job of the State to be the custodians of our railway heritage is another matter. What private enterprise has done in other areas, for example through the National Trust or the National Tramway Museum, is quite remarkable. Perhaps the funding problem for the NRM might be resolved through privatisation? Indeed, one article in my magazine quoted a former NRM head suggesting exactly this solution.
But I digress. The bottom line is that the NRM's annual budget is £4 million per year. Our net contribution to the European Union (that is, just our direct payments minus the rebates and the money the EU kindly gives back to us) is estimated to be about £8 billion in the 2012-3 tax year. In other words, FOUR HOURS' WORTH of the money we give to the EU each year would keep the NRM going for a whole year!
And herein is the biggest failure of the Coalition Government's spending policies. They have tinkered at the edges, upset a lot of people and not tackled the real waste in the economy. The costs of our membership of the EU are one particular waste, but not the biggest. Social security spending amounted to almost £170 billion when the Coalition came to power, and has risen every year since. With it amounting to some 30% of total government spending, the net result is that George Osborne has not actually reducted public spending at all.
Of course, to cut public spending too far too fast creates all manner of problems, as is apparent from the current situation in Greece, where the goverment, under orders from its creditors, the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund, has pared spending to the bone, reducing social security payments and public sector pensions drastically in order to qualify for its bailout. The result is over 60% youth unemployment, shortages of medicines and anecdotal stories of children raiding their school rubbish bins to find food. However, we cannot allow our unaffordable welfare state to become even more unaffordable. It is here that Osborne must make more cuts. He has several options. Firstly, he should tell the EU where to go and simply end all benefits for non-UK citizens. Secondly, he should look to the American model and only allow benefits for a limited time. The effects of knowning you only have a certain number of weeks of state support before you must find work concentrates the mind wonderfully. Thridly, benefit rates must be frozen. All this sounds tough, but the economy will never recover while those in work are having to fork out so much to give to people who aren't.
I recently read a review by Charles Moore of the Daily Telegraph of Stephen King's book When Money Runs out. It contained some chilling lines:- "To King, the obvious thing now staring the West so fiercely in the face that we refuse to look at it is that we might not recover. He does not mean that the whole of our civilisation will suddenly collapse (although the “dull” years of stagnation are tempting people to fight over the diminished spoils). He means that our basic expectation, since 1945, that the West will always bounce back from economic difficulties may now be false."
If the scenario depicted by King is to be averted, real cuts have to be made in public spending. It is the Welfare State and our wasteful membership of the EU (especially the indirect costs), which have to be tackled. Petty tinkering at the edges such as closing our National Railway Museum will not make one iota of difference.
Anyway, Just to reassure you, I haven't gone into hibernation, and there's plenty to discuss, not least George Osborne, our Chancellor, who seems to be pleasing nobody at the moment. When New Labour were thankfully driven from power in 2010, top of the proiroty list for the incoming Coalition government was a return to sound public finances. The spending binges of Gordon Brown and Alastair Darling had left the government - well, the UK taxpayer, to be exact - with monumental debts. Public spending had to be brought down, we were told by George Osborne. It was going to be tough, but the country had been living beyond its means for far too long.
It's not just the left-wing media and the trade unions who have since been howling with rage at "government cutbacks" and criticisng Osbrone for his brutality. A few days ago, a copy of a railway periodical to which I subscribe arrived on my doormat with a lurid headline about the National Railway Museum in York. "NRM under threat," it proclaimed. "Museum could be closed in the wake of funding cuts." Inside were details of an on-line petition to save the NRM which readers were encouraged to sign, "to try to persuade Chancellor George Osborne to halt the absolutely unthinkable."
I haven't visited the NRM for many years, largely as I'm not a great traveller and York is a long way from Sussex where I used to live, and a still fair old hike from my present home in Gloucestershire. However, the NRM's collection isn't all housed at York, or even in a museum. Only last month, I spent a morning volunteering as a car park attendant at the nearby Gloucestershire-Warwickshire Railway, and one of the engines that visited the line for its special gala weekend was the NRM-owned "Schools" class No. 925 Cheltenham - an engine recently restored to working order while in the custody of the Mid-Hants Railway. It is good that so many fine engines have been preserved from the scrapyard, although whether it is the job of the State to be the custodians of our railway heritage is another matter. What private enterprise has done in other areas, for example through the National Trust or the National Tramway Museum, is quite remarkable. Perhaps the funding problem for the NRM might be resolved through privatisation? Indeed, one article in my magazine quoted a former NRM head suggesting exactly this solution.
But I digress. The bottom line is that the NRM's annual budget is £4 million per year. Our net contribution to the European Union (that is, just our direct payments minus the rebates and the money the EU kindly gives back to us) is estimated to be about £8 billion in the 2012-3 tax year. In other words, FOUR HOURS' WORTH of the money we give to the EU each year would keep the NRM going for a whole year!
And herein is the biggest failure of the Coalition Government's spending policies. They have tinkered at the edges, upset a lot of people and not tackled the real waste in the economy. The costs of our membership of the EU are one particular waste, but not the biggest. Social security spending amounted to almost £170 billion when the Coalition came to power, and has risen every year since. With it amounting to some 30% of total government spending, the net result is that George Osborne has not actually reducted public spending at all.
Of course, to cut public spending too far too fast creates all manner of problems, as is apparent from the current situation in Greece, where the goverment, under orders from its creditors, the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund, has pared spending to the bone, reducing social security payments and public sector pensions drastically in order to qualify for its bailout. The result is over 60% youth unemployment, shortages of medicines and anecdotal stories of children raiding their school rubbish bins to find food. However, we cannot allow our unaffordable welfare state to become even more unaffordable. It is here that Osborne must make more cuts. He has several options. Firstly, he should tell the EU where to go and simply end all benefits for non-UK citizens. Secondly, he should look to the American model and only allow benefits for a limited time. The effects of knowning you only have a certain number of weeks of state support before you must find work concentrates the mind wonderfully. Thridly, benefit rates must be frozen. All this sounds tough, but the economy will never recover while those in work are having to fork out so much to give to people who aren't.
I recently read a review by Charles Moore of the Daily Telegraph of Stephen King's book When Money Runs out. It contained some chilling lines:- "To King, the obvious thing now staring the West so fiercely in the face that we refuse to look at it is that we might not recover. He does not mean that the whole of our civilisation will suddenly collapse (although the “dull” years of stagnation are tempting people to fight over the diminished spoils). He means that our basic expectation, since 1945, that the West will always bounce back from economic difficulties may now be false."
If the scenario depicted by King is to be averted, real cuts have to be made in public spending. It is the Welfare State and our wasteful membership of the EU (especially the indirect costs), which have to be tackled. Petty tinkering at the edges such as closing our National Railway Museum will not make one iota of difference.