Cuts, Cuts, Cuts

Posted By Adam Green

Today, David Cameron will walk up to a podium in some Whitehall press-room, clear his throat, grin and speak glazy-eyed about such abstract notions as ‘making difficult choices’, ‘employing fairness and reason’ and ‘being in this together’. Then he’s going to gently unzip his fly, flip you over, spit on your ring and rape you prison-style.

Tomorrow is when the Con-Dem coalition announce their spending review. Cuts, to you and me.

These cuts will be many, and these cuts will be painful. Wicked painful. As I write this, Danny Alexander (nicknamed ‘Beaker’ by his colleagues, after the character from Muppets) a Lib Dem MP and Chief Secretary To The Treasury has just unintentionally leaked the fact that the Coalition are planning to implement savings on cost that will make about 500,000 public sector employees redundant. That’s. Half. A. Million. People. A fucking huge number of actual human beings – give or take, it’s about 1% of the UK population. Add to this the fact that they’re also planning huge reforms to the welfare system and cutting state benefits, and the balance board doesn’t quite add up – many more out of work, and much less money allocated to looking after them. I, for one, don’t get it.

And all this comes after Lord Browne’s revelation that he’d like to raise the bar on University fees to a truly wallet-fucking £12,000 pa.

Keynesian economics it ain’t.

This is all probably just politicking – it’s not unheard of for government to ‘manage expectations’ by releasing deliberately inflated figures and then surprising everyone with much lower ‘more reasonable’ sums when it comes to crunch time, it’s just good management practice. But the sheer heft of the numbers being bandied around suggests some seriously bad news on the cards for tomorrow. Even if the leaked information about the extent of the cuts is exaggerated.

So what are the implications for us? Well, according to some schools of economic thought, cuts this deep will plunge us back into recession, and possibly Depression, the ramifications of which need no explanation. And if you want to go to a good university… just scrap that thought. File it under ‘not in my lifetime’. Lord Browne’s initiative will top-slice Britain’s higher education institutions, effectively creating a two-tier system: Oxford, Cambridge and other Russell Group universities will, by virtue of their reputations, be able to charge a lot of money in fees; Polytechnics will be just-about affordable. It’ll be good universities for the well-to-do, and bad ones for the rest. With an already stagnant jobs market – and one that is about to become a lot more so – it feels like the Con-Dems have earmarked an entire generation for the scrap heap.

Well, I guess that’s just what happens when you’re governed by a guy who looks like someone’s sculpted a perfect replica of C3PO out of ham, and a bunch of his mates from school – all jazzy fucking guys who love nothing more than a nice pair of boot-cut jeans and a rare-breed dog.

Anyway, if you want a laugh at Davcam’s expense, this is pretty good: