How will UK public services fare in the short to medium term?
Even though we may be a number of months away from the next UK general election, the battleground has already been drawn with Labour and the Conservative party at loggerheads over potential public sector service cuts and the impact this will have. Even though the Labour Party had been adamant that no cuts would be forthcoming in the short to medium term, Gordon Brown was this week forced to backtrack and admit that cuts were inevitable although frontline services would not be hit.
The Labour Party's recent accusation that the Conservatives were the party for cuts in public services has been blown out of the water with an indication that the government had been looking at potential real term cuts of 9.7%, just below the 10% accusation levelled at the Conservative party. The truth is that the UK public sector has grown immensely under the Labour Party, taking more and more of the UK government's tax income on public sector pensions, wages and public sector service costs.
Despite what the politicians say, we're likely to see the largest cuts in public services investment since the 1970s and this will not be a short-term fix. The UK budget is set to hit a deficit of £175 billion this year and a higher deficit next year with national debt also rising sharply.
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