Out-of-touch BBC bang on about ‘austerity’ over public sector cuts – but public want to see bloated State chopped back

JUST how much more debt would the Government have to pile on to the shoulders of taxpayers before the BBC stopped accusing it of “austerity”;?

You may have woken up yesterday to think that Chancellor Rachel Reeves is about to throw us all into penury as she clings, Scrooge-like, to the Government’s purse strings, refusing to dole out any of the gold which lurks within.

On BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, presenter Justin Webb put it to Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander that, “We have, or we are about to this week, are we not, to return to austerity”;.

Over on BBC Breakfast, presenter Sally Nugent could hardly contain herself. Speaking of tomorrow’s spring statement, she said: “If you weren’t feeling slightly queasy about it, you certainly are now.”;

But why should taxpayers feel queasy about the prospect of the Government frittering away a little less of their hard-earned cash on fat pay rises for train drivers or on wellbeing courses for civil servants?

Public sector bloated

Her words betrayed the Beeb’s left-wing bias.

If you are likely to be among the 50,000 public sector staff who could be made redundant, or if you are living a life on benefits while pretending to be too sick to work, no doubt you were choking on your corn flakes.

But if you are getting a bit fed up of paying ever more tax while potholes go unfilled and the bins are only collected once a fortnight, you are more likely to be feeling rather pleased that the Chancellor says she is going to force the public sector to become more efficient.

To describe the modest spending cuts which Reeves will announce this week as “austerity”; is ridiculous.

So far, it has been suggested that £5billion will be cut from the welfare budget and £2billion from government administration.

To put that into context, the Office of Budgetary Responsibility predicted last November that the Government will spend £1.276trillion this year. The cuts would be equivalent to just 0.5 per cent of total public spending.

Except that since November, the estimate for this year’s public spending has already been raised by £17billion to £1.293trillion.

The “cuts”;, in other words, will not really be cuts at all — they will not even cancel out the Government’s overspending in the last four months.

They will not make a dent on this year’s deficit, which the OBR expects to be £127billion.

The public sector has never been more bloated. Public spending now accounts for 45 per cent of our GDP — five percentage points higher than before the pandemic and a near record for peacetime.

When Tony Blair came to power it was just 35 per cent.

We have civil service unions bleating about 50,000 job cuts, with Fran Heathcote of the Public and Commercial Services Union claiming it will cause “chaos”;.

Yet those job cuts would not even nearly reverse the 150,000 growth in civil service numbers over the past nine years.

Maybe Brexit negotiations and Covid required a temporary increase in staff, yet those two things are well in the past now and civil service numbers keep on growing.

No wonder civil service unions think they can do their work in four days a week rather than five.

The Government has become hugely overstaffed with pen-pushers with too little to do.

Disgracefully, public sector productivity is now lower than it was in 1997, in spite of advances in technology which ought to have made many human roles redundant.

After splurging money on pay rises for train drivers and many other workers, without even demanding improvements in working practices in return, Reeves seems finally to have got it.

Rather than cut civil servants’ hours, she is going to keep them on five days a week and cut staff numbers instead.

Dangerous nonsense

But that should be just the beginning. The Government is spending £7billion a year supporting illegal migrants — many of whom are making asylum claims in Britain in spite of travelling from other safe countries, such as France.

We could save another £90million a year, at least, by simply not gifting the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, a country which has no reasonable claim on them.

In the eyes of many people on the Left a government can never spend enough money, because every penny frittered helps stimulate the economy which, in turn, boosts tax revenues and so on in a virtuous circle.

What dangerous nonsense.

UK governments have been running deficits for each of the past 22 years, but a fat lot of good that has done. Economic growth is static.

All it has achieved is to force the Government to spend £100billion a year servicing the national debt — more than it spends on education or defence.

“Austerity”; has become a byword for government policy which seeks even slightly to reduce the deficit and get Britain back on an even financial keel.

Fail to do that, though, and we will be sucked rapidly into national bankruptcy.

If Reeves wants to avoid the humiliation wrought on her 1970s predecessor, Denis Healey, who had to go to the IMF to beg for a bailout, she really has no option other than to take an axe to public spending.