Thursday, Feb 02, 2012
Astra Zeneca are getting rid of 7000 people
Manchester evening news: Young and old hit and 400 jobs to go in £24m Salford council cuts
Salford council is slashing 400 jobs as part of a £24m cuts package that will hit the young, old and vulnerable. Town hall chiefs have been forced into a second year of huge savings after the government reduced its grant by a total of 19.6 per cent.
Posted by mark @ 09:47 AM (763 views) Add Comment
9 Comments
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1. libertas said...
Fabulous, because it takes about 3 private sector jobs to fund one public sector job. Why? Because the public sector produces NOTHING and taxes the private sector.
Only problem is that these savings will be diverted into interest payments to banks rather than funding the tax cuts we could have enjoyed had the public understood the benefits of smaller government during the boom times. Thanks Socialists for stealing my inheritance. Why did Grandpa bother fighting the National Socialists in the war just to see Britain adopting the policies of National Socialism?
2. khards said...
So they have been paying them an average of £60k each? I don't think so.
3. Mrmagooisagovteconomist said...
Good job they gave the BBC £20million to help them move there !
4. Simon said...
Khards ,
It says the redundancies are part of a cutting program , not all of it and wages and pension are only part of the cost of employing someone .
A package of £60k is pretty commonplace in the public sector in London .
It's what a police sergeant would get in basic + allowance plus employers contribution to pension or even a constable could get if they did a couple of hours overtime .
5. Bear Necessities said...
@khards - it says as PART of a £24m cuts package. It doesn't say that those 400 jobs = £24m
6. stuartking said...
Don' t worry about the jobs going at Astra Zeneca and Salford council. Cameron's right, apparently, the private sector will pick up the pieces, I've heard MacDonalds will be looking for some more burger-flippers. Anyone know if you can pay a mortgage with a few stale buns and some reconstituted, recovered meat?
As for socialist's stealing your inheritance, Libertas, this is the best analysis I've read of the credit crunch and what followed:
The cause of this recession? The 10 myths on which Tory economic policy is based:
Myth 1: “Austerity will reduce debt.” Wrong. According to the OBR, having fallen between 2007 and 2010, household debt will increase by £531 billion in the next 4 years – which means that, in the unlikely event that Osborne meets his target of eliminating the £142 billion budget deficit by 2015, this will be at the cost of transferring nearly 4 times this amount of debt from the government’s books to the credit cards and overdrafts of UK households.
Myth 2: “We can’t afford to increase borrowing” Wrong again. The national debt is now 60% of GDP. In 1945 it was 237%. Then, as now and always, it was financed by borrowing. All money is created by borrowing. Creating money as debt is just a way of mobilising business activity and investing in future wealth creation. Problems only arise when the money is used not to stimulate economic growth but to speculate, to fuel asset inflation and to pay bankers’ bonuses – and when more money has to be created to enable the repayment of interest, thus creating an endless debt spiral. The only solution is to nationalise the money supply and lend at low or zero interest rates – as in North Dakota, which is one of only two US states not drowning in debt.
Myth 3: “Labour spent all the money.” More nonsense. Even if you add 3% per year for the capital costs of PFI, public spending still averaged only 40% of GDP per annum in the years 1998-2008 and 41% in the years 1998-2010, compared with 40% in the years 1980-97. According to the Treasury Red Book, government spending increased no faster than income between 2002 and 2008.
Myth 4: “The national debt should have been reduced during the boom years.” Fact: Labour did reduce the national debt – from 42% of GDP in 1997 to 36% in 2008. The claim that it should have been paid off before the financial crisis is absurd – firstly because Labour had been elected to increase spending on neglected public services and secondly because the two countries which have required an IMF bailout, Iceland and Ireland, were both in surplus in 2007, as was Spain. Balanced budgets did nothing to prevent the crisis in these 3 countries nor would they have done in Britain.
Myth 5: “Labour is the party of high taxes.” No it isn’t and that’s what’s been the problem. The average annual tax take was the same under Blair and Brown as under Thatcher and Major (36% of GDP) and less than the 2010 EU average (40%).
Myth 6: “High taxes discourage enterprise.” Not true. In 2009 there were 8 European countries with a higher GDP per hour than the UK. These were Austria, Germany, Belgium, Holland, France, Norway, Sweden and Ireland. With the single exception of Ireland, the total tax burden as a % of GDP was higher in all these countries than in the UK.
Myth 7: “Regulation smothers entrepreneurship.” No it doesn’t. UK employees have less protection than almost anywhere else in the EU, whereas those countries with the strongest employment laws – Holland, Norway and Austria, for example – have lower unemployment and a higher GDP per capita. By contrast, in the US, the archetypal hire and fire economy, unemployment is running at nearly 10%.
Myth 8: “The economy is being crippled by massive welfare bills.” But in 1997 welfare spending as a % of GDP was 8%. In 2010 it was 7%. And unemployment benefits in the UK are amongst the lowest in Europe, having fallen from 17% of average earnings in 1976 to 10% in 2011. As for welfare sapping the will to work, unemployment was at its lowest in the 1950s, when unemployment benefits were at their highest in relation to pay.
Myth 9: “Labour left a legacy of massive welfare fraud.” Wrong again. Benefit fraud has been declining for years and accounts for less than 0.5% of the welfare budget (£1.1 billion). Compare this to the £16 billion of benefits which, go unclaimed every year, and the astronomical sums lost through tax avoidance and evasion.
Myth 10: “The best way to reduce the budget deficit is to cut spending.” Another lie. In April 2010 the budget deficit was £163 billion. By April 2011, it had fallen to £142 billion. Why? Because, from September 2009 to September 2010, increased spending led to a fall in unemployment and a £35 billion increase in tax revenues as the economy grew by 2.8%. According to the OBR, the budget deficit will be £130 billion by April 2012 – which means that it will have fallen by less during this financial year (£12 billion) than in 2010-11 (£21 billion), and at the cost of a slump in GDP growth to around 0.6%, representing a loss in output of about £30 billion.
Still, best not think about it, you don't want to let reality spoil those fairy stories you've being reading in the Hate Mail or Torygraph, eh?
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8. mark said...
myth 6
it may not discourage enterprise however it soon fails, but from a business point of view, we are being offered goods from companies saying pay cash and we wont charge vat, since the raise to 20% i have never known so many businesses to offer this kind of fiddle to sell us goods, high taxes encourage fiddles, scams, theft and reduced spending.
TAXES IN THIS COUNTRY ARE TOO HIGH AND TOO COMPLEX
9. miken said...
Some of the cuts here in Solihull are just getting silly.
They are planning to substantially reduce the opening hours at the recycling centre at the inconvenience of huge numbers of people. Just to save like 30k.
It's about time that real 'waste' was reduced, rather than putting people out of a job. Unless of course the job is a non-job that is not essential to running the council.