Knowing how much you enjoy my usual 'political' posts I thought I'd mix it up by responding to my old friend and polar opposite LC, and
his cuts post. I hope you don't mind LC.
From my perspective it’s been a bit of a Phony War so far. The only tangible difference for us is that the Baby Rhyme Time sessions at our local library are under threat if they close the place down, but that’s not really the end of the world.That may be because you live in a relatively wealthy part of London.
The cuts are harshest in the poorest boroughs. They're gunning for the poor, the vulnerable and the weak. (Because they're Tories, and selfish greedy cowardly cunts.)
Apart from that, it’s business as usual at the moment, despite all the doom and gloom in the press about how everything’s going horribly wrong. Wife’s deciding whether or not she wants to go back to work and she’s found no shortage of nursing jobs on offer, even though the NHS is supposed to be cost-cutting.
Well, I'm glad for you and Mrs LC. Again, it depends on your area. But then, no one said there won't still be a need for nurses, or teachers, or any other public sector employee - we still need schools and hospitals, right, but the conditions staff will be working under will just get more and more pressurised as the budgets get slashed. And wages & pensions will go down.
I’m not sure whether we’ve just been lucky enough to avoid getting stung, or the cuts generally aren’t as bad as people expected, or if they just haven’t started to bite yet and things are likely to get a lot worse.
Are you joking? This is
just the beginning! We haven't even had the budget yet. We're still living on the remnants of the Labour administration - that's our budget for the next year in school. Next year it will start to sink in. Don't be short term in your thinking. Why did they make changes so quickly? Because they're thinking long-term. Don't be complacent, I'm begging you...
And to return to your original question...
How many of you have actually been hit by the public spending cuts in any significant way?Pay freeze for the next two years (with inflation going up, this is a pay cut.) Friends and colleagues losing their jobs. Academies schools undercutting us (they will legally be able to employ unqualified teachers at smaller salaries.) An attempt to drain my
pension away (with retrospective change from RPI to CPI and proposal to raise the retirement age from 60 to 68 (!) - effectively, working longer for less money. )
But most of all, worst of all, in Tower Hamlets they are cutting special needs services, children's centres, behaviour support, school sports co-ordinators, ICT support centre, after school clubs, sports clubs, the Junior Youth Service, speech and language services - which as well as being unbelievably unjust to the deprived kids that we work with, seriously affecting their already reduced life chances , is going to make mine and my colleagues' jobs day to day pretty impossible to do.
For now, we still have support staff, and staff to work one on one with special needs children. You can have no idea what it will be like when we lose them, the special schools will close down (because they are expensive to run, and let's face it, those kids are never going to contribute to the economy, why bother throwing good money at them?) and we have to cater for complex special needs in our mainstream classes, without support. It is a shocking, cynical and terrible way to destroy a society. Out of nothing but greed.
I'm Alright, Jack got us into this trouble in the first place. Don't be one of
them.