In private, he was saying something else.
George Osborne's austerity budget will result in the loss of up to 1.3m jobs across the economy over the next five years according to a private Treasury assessment of the planned spending cuts, the Guardian has learned.
Unpublished estimates of the impact of the biggest squeeze on public spending since the second world war show that the government is expecting between 500,000 and 600,000 jobs to go in the public sector and between 600,000 and 700,000 to disappear in the private sector by 2015.
he would have had access to the forecasts traditionally prepared for ministers and senior civil servants
So it looks like this utterly evil budget is designed to help the low-employment, tax avoiding financial services sector (big Tory donors) while abandoning everybody else. So much for 'we're all in this together'.
3 comments:
The article also says: <>, which means a net increase of 1.2 million jobs... or am I missing something? If you accept their figures for job losses, then you also have to accept their figures for job increases and do the maths. Or just accept all the figures are wild guesswork and that no-one really knows what will happen. You also need, for comparison purposes, the figures for all the private sector jobs lost during the recession versus the number of public sector jobs lost during the same period.
Looks like the quote I put in from the Guardian got snipped by the angle brackets, it should say: "the treasury is assuming that growth in the private sector will create 2.5m jobs in the next 5 years to compensate...". Hence a net gain of 1.2m jobs.
I'd go with 'wild guesswork'. I cannot see how millions of private sector jobs are going to be created. As today's Guardian points out, this didn't happen under 13 years of Labour and certainly didn't happen under 18 years of the Tories.
Our manufacturing industries are closed or in the process of moving to countries with lax safety, employment and environmental laws. Some decline in average wages may persuade a few companies to expand here, but I doubt it.
The other problem is that exports require an export market - there's no sign of recovery elsewhere either, so no demand.
If there's any prospect of an export-led manufacturing recovery, I'd devalue the pound pretty quickly to stimulate demand (and reduce our deficit).
Basically - what are all these people going to do? So much of the private sector is leeching off the public sector, or engaged in services. We can't all cut each others' hair!
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