During the last fiscal year, the UK government spent £691 billion. Where did the money go? Most of it went on social benefits, health and education. Interest payments took up a sizable chunk, despite the Bank of England's attempts to keep rates low. Public investment was also a hefty number.
If Her Majesty's Government is going to make a sizable reduction in public expenditure, there is little point looking for savings among the other items. We could abolish the foreign office (FCO), stop offering AID to poor countries and leave the EC, and the savings would quite limited. However, we might get somewhere if we abolished Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
11 comments:
I think abolishing Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland's subsidies is an excellent idea ! If the purpose is to redistribute wealth and make them rich it isn't working. Maybe if they were forced to live in the real world they would have to make some changes that would generate wealth. Getting to the point where 70 or 80% of your economy is controlled by the government and wondering why you are poor is insane.
Generate wealth? Now that is an idea.
That diagram is quite astonishing.
Time to stop 3rd world immigration and start repatriation.
Thats going to make savings in ss, health, justice, education, local gov, Scotland, Wales and NI.
Whats not to like?
Who knows where all the money the governments spend.
Where is England's equivalent to Scotland wales & N Ireland?
What goes into "Other Expenditures"? Seems very big and curiously undefined.
It would be nice to see a breakdown of social security benefits.
How much is pensions, both old age and ex civil servant, how much is unemployment benefit, how much is disabilty based and how much do we have to pay to top up the wages of people who are not paid enough by their employers.
If you look at health, from personal knowledge about half goes on management but in most private organisations less than a quarter goes on management.
Great idea. I like to notion of Scotand not having to be financed from Westminster. And I like the other side of that coin too. Scotland doesn't contribute to Westminster either. Oh, and we don't get to send our boys off to shitholes on the other side of the earth to do uncle sams poodles dirty work. Whats not to like? Saor Alba.
Large amounts of surplus 'management' in the police, the health service, education, and of course central and local government. People who claim to be 'managers' having meetings, devising policies, creating ever more recording and monitoring processes for those who do the work to follow as well. 60% of those who work in my university neither teach nor research. That's an awful lot of 'support' services. But with every process and committee stuffed with these 'managers', whether it is the health service, the police, education or whatever, How can it change? They have their abusive processes and arguments well worked out and are skilled at abusing their power over those who actually do the work. So in the end the productive and needed workers have to support bloated bureaucracies, and those who are ineffective in the real work, or work-shy, retreat into the meta-language of 'management', the corpulent phraseology of double-speak. Shame.
You can't just say, such and such is expensive lets cut.
The issue is how much value you get from that expenditure.
Scotland and Wales use some public spending but they also pay a lot in.
How much does foreign Aid pay back?
EC? we are one of the few net contributors.
Debt interest? this is mostly on borrowings that were squandered in 10 years of buying votes, it was not used for legitimate investment on infrastructure.
Public investment, whats that?
fcuking windmills? (vastly more expensive than gas powerstation)
And the high speed rail boondoggle? (just to allow Londoners to have access to a larger commuter belt, which will price locals out)
As a previous commentor mentioned, Social security and Health need to be broken down much further.
Social Security is intentionally all lumped together by the government as they know its hard for anyone to criticise anything that comes under that banner.
One problem is housing benefit that traditionally goes to people with the most children..
ie. chavs and foreigners.
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