Happy Christmas Britain!

[David Guyatt]

Using a not uncommon Scrooge-cum-elite technique of sacking people at Christmas, just for the fun of it, 100,000 poor souls have this to feast on"

Coalition wields axe over Christmas as 100,000 jobs to go by spring
Flood of warning letters expected to be sent out before 1 January deadline as public sector cuts are formally announced

Patrick Butler and Polly Curtis
The Guardian, Thursday 16 December 2010


Public servants – possibly including the police – face job cuts.

At least 100,000 public servants will receive grim news over the Christmas holidays or soon after as councils, police forces and other public services race to meet a deadline of 1 January to formally announce job cuts.

An analysis of local authority documents reveals that the number of council redundancies directly resulting from the coalition's austerity measures is expected to break the 100,000 mark by early in the new year, fuelled by the swingeing cuts announced this week to councils' budgets and the pressure to start cutting before the new financial year in April.

This comes on top of the 33,000 drop in public sector jobs over the three months to October that was detailed yesterday in official unemployment data and is likely to lead to a torrent of "at risk" warning letters hitting doormats across the country in the next few weeks. The letters are a legal warning that your job could be at risk. After months of political warnings, the imminent bloodletting in town halls across the country is the first tangible sign of the government's austerity budget beginning to bite outside Whitehall.

Council chiefs must reduce posts by 31 March in order to start making savings in their new reduced budgets, but by law they have to give staff 90 days' notice, meaning up to 140 councils that have not yet announced planned redundancies may break the news over the Christmas holiday period.

"Thousands of local government workers face having their Christmas ruined by redundancy notices," said Brendan Barber, general secretary of the Trades Union Congress, yesterday. "Councils in particular are bringing forward job losses in order to cope with the deep budget cuts that take effect next April."

Eighty-two of the UK's 433 councils have already issued HR1 forms, which set out upper estimates of the numbers of workers they expect to have to make redundant, informing employees that their jobs are now at risk. The current total, as calculated by the GMB union, is 76,000. The remaining councils are expected to follow suit over the next three weeks, though some are opting to stomach the extra costs of salaries into their new budgets to avoid the negative publicity of laying people off at Christmas.

Employers and unions at each council will then begin a series of negotiations aimed at avoiding compulsory redundancies, including voluntary redundancy, cancelling agency work contracts and implementing a recruitment freeze.

A flurry of new public sector redundancies will increase pressure on ministers. The government accepts predictions that 330,000 jobs will be lost in the public sector over the next four years, but insists that this will be compensated by a rise in private sector jobs.

Yesterday, however, the latest official employment statistics from the Office for National Statistics revealed a 35,000 rise in unemployment in the three months to October, mainly caused by 33,000 jobs lost from the public sector, while the private sector flatlined. Job cuts are falling hardest in the north-east and Wales, and more people are taking part-time jobs to avoid unemployment.

The increase in female joblessness was double that of men and the number of 16- to 24-year-olds out of work increased by 28,000 to 943,000, one of the highest figures since records began in 1992, giving a youth jobless rate of 19.8%.

Douglas Alexander, the shadow work and pensions secretary, said it was a result of George Osborne's "economic experiment". He said: "These worrying figures show that the private sector is not yet creating enough jobs to make up for the posts that are being cut in the public sector."

David Cameron admitted to the Commons during prime minister's question time to being "concerned" about the figures. "Of course anyone should be concerned, and I am concerned by a rise in unemployment," he said.

"We have got to get the private sector going, increase the number of jobs that are available. Over the last six months, we have seen 300,000 new private sector jobs. We need more of them, and keeping the economy out of the danger zone is the way to get them."

Job losses so far extend from the local authorities to Whitehall to quangos and government-funded charities. A quarter of government-backed charities and four our of 10 charities overall are expecting to make redundancies in the next year, a survey published today by the Charity Finance Directors Group, the Institute of Fundraising and consultants PWC finds.

Local authorities which have already announced their redundancy estimates include Lancashire, which expects up to 5,000 posts to go, Birmingham (5,000), Leeds (3,000) and Norfolk (3,000).

Paul Kenny, general secretary of the GMB, said: "Council finance committee meetings are being held this week at many of the other councils to finalise the issuing of formal notices of redundancies that will trigger a 90-day consultation process. There are troubled times ahead and a lot of families face a miserable Christmas and bleak prospects for 2011."

[Kenneth Kapel]

At another site a few days after the UK election and the Tory - LibDem coalition was installed as the new Bristish government I suggested that the Tories were going to impose an austerity budget on its citizens. I was called a liar and some things worse by some Uk and Amican conservatives who dominate this sites ( Not Deep Politics Forum ) Current Events thread. Well the Tories have done it and now the U.S. media is pushing the line thats its the middle class that has caused our econnomic turn down and are NOT suffering enough. Big money owns the media and the media follows capitalism orders. Will people ever learn ? Mammon rides supreme.