£6bn of savings

Yesterday, Osbourne and Laws announced £6bn of savings - to try and save the country from a sovereign debt crisis.

Frankly, a bit pathetic, really. If they want to actually do something about debt levels - which I suspect that they do - they need to make rather bigger inroads than this, which appears to be something 5% of the annual deficit. The errors on the previous month's deficit calculation were bigger than this.

It's all posturing, mixed with cowardice - either they actually don't want to do anything yet because they're scared it will screw the recovery: an entirely reasonable viewpoint, but then why make £6bn of cuts? Or, they want to cut now, to make inroads quickly, in which case £6bn is a piss in the ocean and not worth mentioning.

And, of course, where has this £6bn come from? At least nothing very stupid yet, really. The child trust fund was pretty assinine to start with, as are any non means-tested benefits. To put it bluntly, why should Sammy Cammy be getting a lump sum of a few hundred quid from the government when she's got god knows how many millions in the bank? The rest seem to come from "non front line efficiency savings". Well, either the people doing these jobs were wasting their time and were utterly pointless in the first place - and, no matter what you think of New Labour, I don't think they're stupid enough to employ random people to do nothing at all, purely for the sake of wasting taxpayers money and driving up everyones' taxes and therefore losing votes - or this will have some, if only minor, impact on public services.

My guess is that it will have a very slight impact, but the cuts are so pointlessly small that it won't really be felt yet. But there have to be much bigger cuts to come next year. Let's hope the economy is stronger by the time that happens.