If You Want A Taste Of The Future You Must Bring Your Own Spoon

Last month (reports the New York Times online), the United Kingdom of Great Britain, Ireland, and Those Dominions Across The Seas, began the slide down The Great Austerity: "[T]he British government abolished the U.K. Film Council, the Health Protection Agency and dozens of other groups that regulate, advise and distribute money in the arts, health care, industry and other areas."

The shiny new Tory Conservative British government has decreed that to reduce the national debt by lowering annual budget deficits, cuts must be made in nearly every spending category across the board. And their effects will be immediate.

In June [the New York Time reported], the government announced its first round of cuts, removing about $10 billion from the current year’s budget.

While that is a drop in the bucket compared to the final goal, the reduction measures have already had severe consequences. Public sector workers across the country, except for the lowest paid, will have their salaries frozen for the next two years. Oxfordshire, facing a nearly $1 million trim in its road safety budget, has been forced to shut down all its 161 traffic speed cameras.

The cuts mean that Nottinghamshire plans to close three recycling facilities and some of its day care centers. And that the city of Coventry, which already cut spending in January, is trying to find $5.6 million more to cut from its current child services budget.

But none of this is much compared to what the country will face when the government issues its long-term budget plans in October. Mr. Mutton, the Coventry official, predicted that the next round of cuts would cost the city at least 10,000 jobs in the public and private sectors. Analysts have estimated that some 600,000 public-sector jobs could be lost nationwide.

... and no idea how many private sector jobs. I wonder where those people will find work? Basically, I believe Britain in the immediate future will be very much like England in the nearly twenty years after World War Two (1945-63), when Great Britain was a cold, drab place -- certainly not Tony Blair's "Cool Britannia".

And the British Tory politicians who have done this have American Cousins in the House and Senate who believe we should do exactly the same here.

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