There were always going to be massive cuts in public spending ... In Liz we Truss and Crazy Karteng just made the situation worse because they upped the cost of public borrowing. If you borrow you have to pay it back and if the cost of borrowing goes up obviously it takes longer to repay. The primary way to raise Exchequer money to pay back national debt is to do it through taxation (hence the temporary NI increase). Add to everything else, pandemic debt, international interest rate rises and uncontrollable price increases because of Putin then your timing for unfunded tax cuts has to be considered. It wasn't and our inexperienced politicians and prospects for the UK economy were pounced on by the wolves. Boris was a lying, self interested Oaf and Liz Truss was useless. Step up Rishi. Whoever runs the country has huge problems to resolve and the public will have to bear some pain. The vulnerable should not have to bear it disproportionately but the government needs to act quickly.

The Exchequer could save a huge amount of money by ignoring the triple lock on pensions. Maybe by halving the state pension increase next year but that would have profound implications for those who rely upon their pension as their sole source of income at a time when the price of basic essentials is going through the roof. Good luck Rishi.

Edited by Henry of Peckham (26 Oct 2022 8.24am)

Denial is not just a river in Egypt

No. Basically instead of unfunded ideology we have been forced to recognise economic reality.

Everyone would like "tax cuts and investment" but you cannot pull them out of thin air. Magic money trees don't exist to plug the gaps left when taxes are cut and investments neither happen overnight, nor are made very quickly when the world is facing recession and we also are already struggling with labour shortages caused, at least in part, by Brexit.

Truss's plans were beyond stupid. They were dangerously irresponsible and have made a bad situation worse. They produced a run on the £, market instability, higher interest rates and inflationary pressures. Any benefit from tax cuts would have been more than wiped out by increased costs.

Why on earth would anyone be happy about that? Having to rescue the country from stupidity is shameful, but necessary.

No-one will enjoy what the next few months, and years, will bring but there's just no alternative. We can argue about the detail but the bottom line is that everyone will face higher taxation and reduced services. My own view is that as many of our services are already stretched to capacity the opportunity to cut them is quite limited. So I expect the emphasis to be on taxation.

I expect a windfall tax on the energy companies. Rather than a cut in income tax I anticipate it increasing and the levels at which the higher bands kick in decreasing. VAT may well increase too. This may all be done in stages to avoid too big a shock to the economy at any one time.

Who-ever was in power would have faced huge problems but having blustering Johnson, and then ideological Truss, as Tory PMs has made things worse and, worse of all, lost the Tory party their reputation for integrity and financial competence, and probably delivered us into the hands of a disjointed, ill prepared and uninspiring opposition.

For the avoidance of doubt any comments in response to a previous post are directed to its ideas and not at any, or all, posters personally.

Economic reality is where we are and I agree.
As badger posted some will now not see the need for cuts, but couldn’t wait to stop the tax breaks wrongly introduced by the former pm.
Efficiency in the state sector is going to be needed. Less management and more foot soldiers. Waste is huge in health and education. My mrs works in a school and I have seen skip loads of books and paper just in a school of 400 odd kids. Imagine the waste in the huge comps in the big cities. The same with the nhs. Root and branch checks and change is needed.

I have heard " efficiencies and waste cutting for decades, no Govt ever seems to grasp the nettle.

Responsibility Deficit Disorder is a medical condition. Symptoms include inability to be corrected when wrong, false sense of superiority, desire to share personal info no else cares about, general hubris. It's a medical issue rather than pure arrogance.

I think they should give no police force a go. We’re almost there anyway. No need for BLM defunding the police. We’ll do it so we can all have another takeaway.

COYP

It's literally the welfare state....even with public pensions on average if you live longer than seven years all those contributions are used up.

Just recently Sunak forwarded government checks to people for energy bills.

A lot of people were paid to sit at home on lockdowns....all that was borrowed money from the treasury....400 billion was spent over that period, more than we spent fighting WW2, and we didn't recover from that until the sixties.....most people just nodded along and weren't told the extent of impact to the already massively damaged system.....a system that was done for in 2008 but had been racking up massive debt since the nineties.

Edited by Stirlingsays (26 Oct 2022 2.22pm)

'Who are you and how did you get in here? I'm a locksmith. And, I'm a locksmith.' (Leslie Nielsen)