11mar2004: The British
Budget day approaches. Once more, Gordon Brown will wrest yet
more in taxes from the British people to pay for Labour's tax-and-spend
policies that succeed only in bloating Britain's bureaucracy and blunting
its competitive edge.
Fixing this would be easy - if he'd just drop his socialist politics
for a second and learn some basic economics. (Such as what plus and minus signs
mean.) Here's my take on how it can be done. (To be fair, I use official figures
below - sources here, here, here,
and here.)
The Dilemma: Government spending is up; tax receipts
are down. The shortfall - as estimated by most commentators in both media and
government - is 11bn. To plug it, next week's budget needs to raise another £13-17bn
in taxes (probably by the Blair/Brown method of 'stealth taxes') or cut spending
by the same amount. Or does it? Here are some facts...
Fact: At the end of 1996, just before Labour came
into power, the public sector employed 5.069m people. The left-leaning Guardian,
a supporter of Labour and hence not likely to be sensationalist here, estimates
that figure is over 6m today. So since Labour came to power, the public sector
has increased by 8.448%.
Fact: Also at the end of 1996, these little islands were
home to 58.283m people. The 2002 census states 59.229m. (Both are revised estimates
released late last year.) Let's be fair and assume it's continued to increase
at the same rate since, making 59.423m people in the UK today. So since Labour
came to power, the UK population has increased by 1.956%. Opinion: I can't see how it's necessary for the public
sector to grow faster than the UK's population. So the 'fair' number of heads
the public sector should have added during Labour's time in power is 99,149.
The real number is at least 931,000.
Fact: The average earnings of a London public sector
employee are £535 a week. Assuming 20% London weighting, that means the
average UK public sector employee costs £22,256 a year. Which means those
extra 831,851 workers cost the UK £18,514bn a year - before any
costs of keeping them at their desks.
Conclusion: The funding gap is entirely attributable
to public sector bloat - yet this increase hasn't led to any improvement in services:
schools, hospitals, and transport have not improved noticeably since Labour came
to power. (And in many areas - like the railways - they've become far worse.) All Brown needs to do is cut the public sector back to reasonable
levels, and the UK's running a surplus once more. In a time of near-full
employment where companies can't find anyone to work for them, would issuing
831,000 P45s to demonstrably non-essential people really be that hard?
