A mere billion or two? Let the bankers pay
Posted: 14/03/2014 | Author: The Political Idealist | Filed under: Uncategorized |Leave a commentHow disappointing to see Hamish McRae (12 March) fall into the old trap of likening public expenditure to household spending.
Mr McRae is right that £1.9bn – the figure the Labour Party’s innovative job guarantee policy would cost – is a drop in the ocean when the Government spends about £700bn a year. However, he is wrong to argue that Ed Balls’s linking of the spending pledge with the reinstatement of the Bankers’ Bonus Tax is “absurd”.
When the next government (of whatever party) takes office, Britain will be smarting from massive public spending cuts. The idea that ministers should be “bright enough to figure out the ways to save” £1.9bn, as Mr McRae suggests, is what is really absurd. I should think that there is no few billion pounds of unnecessary public spending (except on the Trident weapons system, but that is another matter) left to cut, after half a decade of austerity. There is no fat left to shed.
So I’d rather the Government took a modest contribution from well-off banking executives than remove yet another essential service from those who’ve already paid dearly for regressive austerity measures. Anybody who has witnessed the consequences of spending cuts on our poor, our young and our future should feel the same.
Jack Darrant
Published in the Independent on 14th March 2014.
