It starts here

It is obvious: cuts are coming.

After a break to have children my wife, who is a teacher, trained to become a specialist in speech and language.  She took a job in the reading centre in Croydon teaching children with language problems.  She also qualified to teach children with learning difficulties to read.  After a long time in the reading centre she took a job as an area SENCO teaching children with special needs.  This summer she resigned from Croydon LEA to join a government centrally funded scheme to learn to become a reading recovery expert and gain the skills to teach teachers.  She saw this as a way of increasing her effectiveness.  I warned her that it would be cut and she would not even finish the two years.  She did it anyway.

Last week she received two letters offering her volountary redundancy and this week it was confirmed that Croydon would not continue with her course after July.  There is a huge investment and a large potential return on that investment that will not now happen.  Money wasted.

But that is what cuts are about.  They are savage and brutal.  They have to be.  There is no such thing as ‘gentle cuts’.

This will happen everywhere.  A lot of money spent that was effectively wasted.  It raises the question in my mind as to why the Labour government did it.  It was obvious that overspending was taking place and there would have to be cuts.  Indeed it is well known that in the months leading up to the election Labour went out and spent and committed at an ever more ferocious rate to make the cuts even more painful when they came.

I have been trying to think why:

1.  They wanted to get the country into a mess from which only socialism could retrieve it.
2.  They wanted to leave a mess for the Conservatives to tackle in the hope that they would be blamed.
3.  They had some rosey-eyed, Mikawberesque view that they had to do it and ‘something would come along’.
4.  They were just incompetent.
5.  Something else that is beyond my imaginings.

Yesterday the cuts in local government were announced.  There are dozens of meetings being held in the Croydon LEA by staff, HR, and unions.  the atmosphere has been created such that these are not fight-the-cuts meetings but working out an orderly exit of vast swathes of people.  If you have a child with reading problems be assured it will be allowed to fail…unless you have deep pockets.

Adding to earlier entries, I was horrified that the foreign aid budget was being protected.  I still am.  It is just bribing with a politically acceptable veneer of do-goodery.  The budget is ₤8bn…who cares.

It is obvious: cuts are coming that will affect you in ways you never thought possible as well as all the ones you had thought of.