Owen Tudor
European governments and the European Parliament have cut a deal to allow for a cap on bankers’ bonuses, expected to be adopted by the European Parliament next week. Welcoming the decision, the Robin Hood Tax campaign said that the extra money saved by the banks could be recycled, through a Robin Hood Tax, towards preventing cuts and tackling the challenges of climate change and global poverty.
Owen Tudor
Foreign Secretary William Hague has announced some initial cuts in the FCO budget (but so far only in the programmes it runs – a very small part of the FCO budget compared with staffing, embassies and high commissions). Out of the £140m programmes budget, he plans to cut £18m (12-13%), but different areas will suffer disproportionate cuts. And the big loser will be overseas scholarships.
UPDATE – I now have the figures for current expenditure on many of the programmes mentioned below, and have built them into the text (showing what’s updated). In proportional terms, the biggest cut is in programmes on drugs and crime programmes, cut in half, but the much larger scholarship programme is being cut by 40% which is probably the most important cut. Low carbon growth programmes are ‘only’ being cut by 17%, so not as big a loser as I first thought.
Paul Nowak
Yesterday the government announced a £1bn regional growth fund to offset the offset the impact of the swingeing spending cuts , but a quick glance at today’s papers suggests that the regional growth fund sticking plaster won’t do much to mitigate the impact of the hatchet-like cuts inflicted by the Budget.
Last night Adam blogged about the Guardian’s report that the Treasury has estimated that the budget will cost 1.3m jobs. As the TUC predicted in our budget submission, these job losses will not be restricted to the public sector – instead, up to 700,000 private sector jobs are expected to be lost by 2015 as a result of the government’s programme of swingeing cuts.
Adam Lent
The Chancellor claimed his Budget was fair and it turns out not to be the case. Now his claim that it will benefit the economy is looking equally ropey. The admission comes not from a think tank but from the Treasury itself. Larry Elliott of The Guardian has seen a leaked presentation by Treasury officials which predicts that between 500,000 and 600,000 jobs will be lost in the public sector over the next five years with a further 600,000 to 700,000 in the private sector. None of this appeared in the Budget of course. Didn’t he say something about transparency and honesty as well?
Nigel Stanley
Last Saturday I had a post called state pensions will be cut by the budget.
However Nigel Hawkes from Straight Statistics has kindly pointed out an error. In working out the indexing figure for the state pension in 2012 I forgot the 2.5 per cent minimum uprating – I used the CPI figure of 1.9 per cent instead.
This does not make the claim in the headline wrong. The state pension will be lower under the new system in both 2012 and 2013, but the difference is much smaller. It’s right that I should ‘fess up and admit my mistake, and no doubt provide some amusement for our less sympathetic readers.
Owen Tudor
David Cameron went to Toronto last weekend promising an end to Gordon Brown style new initiatives at every G20 summit, and in a feat of post-modernist irony, chose to mark this with a new initiative of his own: he demanded that the G20 should follow up on past decisions and make sure they got implemented. Au contraire, as they say in nearby Quebec. What the Canadian G20 came up with was the most vacuous, indecisive and unfocused G20 declaration in the body’s short two year history. The Washington Post’s Harold Schneider summed up the different positions adopted by governments on their way to the meeting.
Richard Exell
According to the Prime Minister, the G20 Summit of world leaders backed the UK’s Budget as ‘tough but fair’. How does this claim stack up?
The Summit’s Declaration had something for everyone, especially on the question of whether or not it is too early to start cutting deficits.
Richard Exell
The British Medical Association has released the results of a survey that shows that health cuts are already a reality.
Nicola Smith
It transpires that as well as the scrapping of the ‘golden hello’ recruitment subsidy programme, the Government has cut Care First Careers - the £75m programme to help 50,000 young unemployed people enter the adult social care workforce.
Nicola Smith
10,000 staff are reportedly being cut from Jobcentre Plus. At a time when claimant unemployment is forecast to remain high for years to come, this will inevitably impact on the service and support provided to jobseekers – as well as adding to the overall unemployment level as Jobcentre workers lose their own jobs.