Massive Cuts

A commentator has said that if the British police had to mount an operation such as that deployed against the Mali hotel jihadists they would have been cut to shreds, for lack of numbers, up-to-date arms and training. There is set to be a shortage of teachers because, given the sort of publicity they receive and the ridiculous amount of responsibility with no backing from authority when the savages they try to control turn against them, recruiting targets are not being met. The NHS cannot attract, train and retain sufficient British-born staff, so chooses to use foreign nurses of sometimes uncertain provenance. And the junior doctors have voted 98% in favour of strike action.

It all comes back to the same thing; priorities. In the estimation of most observers all the above can be fixed with money, what a shame it’s rationed. It has to be though; money-rationing is how economies work. There is only so much to go around – no matter what the left hand side of humanity believes – so all who want state cash have to compete for it. And the way that competition is staged is for each recipient of the tax dollar to demonstrate how utterly dependent we all are on their services by withdrawing those services.

I wish there were more strikes, sometimes. Every time public servants go on strike the rest of us have to decide how we deal with it and unsurprisingly, those who deal with it the most easily are those who actually pay for it. Given the paucity of provision those who can will adapt to circumstances and find alternatives. In other words, reliance on the state for all or part of your needs exposes you to the risks posed by what they used to call ‘industrial action’, but given that most of industry is paying its own way these days the term is, like many benefit bunnies, largely redundant.

Money, like common sense, is not in limitless supply; when there is not enough money some have to go without. But have you ever noticed that among those in work, who choose to have only the lifestyle they can afford to support, both money and common sense, while maybe not in abundance, are nevertheless in sufficiency? The more people need the state, the more strike action hurts them, especially so when administrators choose to apply the cuts not to indulgent, back-office functions or self-publicity but to frontline staff.

This principle applies just as much to government itself as to the services it purports to provide. Ministers with departments in charge of large budgets for nebulous affairs. Vanity projects and inefficient procurement. Layers of unaccountable management and consultancy far above and long detached from the day-to-day business of just getting on with business. The long litany of abandoned causes shows, in its trail of wreckage that national administrations are just as guilty of profligacy as those they point the finger at. And bestriding all of this like an expensive behemoth is the massive waste of money that is the totally undemocratic, beyond-the-law bureaucracy of the European Union.

Looking for massive cuts? Look no further...

Once an agency is so big it no longer needs to beg for money but demand it, you have to wake up and realise its sense of entitlement knows no bounds. The gigantic millstone round the necks of the productive economies of Europe is so wedded to its ‘principles’ that even the defence of European citizens is secondary to sticking firmly to a discredited ideal. The insufferable arrogance of the EU as regularly revealed by Jean Claude Juncker is the single most compelling reason to leave. If you’re looking to make savings, if you’re looking for massive ‘cuts’, look no further than Brussels.