When Savings Aren’t Quite As Good As They Seem

Recent budget “savings” announced by the Tories in government spending have been swallowed up by an increase in foreign aid, reports our correspondent Southwest Nationalist.

Francis Maude, Minister for the Cabinet Office and Paymaster General, has his face plastered over many of the news outlets today, telling us what a great job the Conservatives have done of making savings.

In just 10 months they’ve apparently managed to save £3.75 billion – a saving equivalent to 200,000 junior nurses or 150,000 secondary school teachers Maude said.

Sounds good, God knows that we could do with nurses and teachers, throw in some midwives as well, it will make a change from training them up to serve in every country but our own.

The Conservatives have previously claimed at the last election that these savings could be used to fund a cut in National Insurance.

But, wait. Let’s look at this a different way.

Take a look at the picture, taken from the Department for International Development (DFID) spending review as published in their website. The columns for 2010/11 and 2014/2015 are of the most interest.

Notice the increase in the Departmental Expenditure Limit – up from £7.8 billion in 2010/11 to £11.5 billion in 2014/15. Unless my maths is very bad, that shows an increase of £3.7 billion.

So, what these £3.75 billion in savings Francis Maude is gloating about could be said to be doing is not providing extra teachers, or nurses, but rather just – leaving us a few quid in change – paying for the extra money the DFID will be spending in 2014/15.

It doesn’t even come close to covering their budget for a year, just the increase, and just for that one year compared to current expenditure limits.

It’s some food for thought.

If ConDem hadn’t ring-fenced, and pledged to drastically increase foreign aid spending by 35% in real terms, how many nurses and teachers could that extra money have provided for Britain, or how far could National Insurance have been cut?

And, heaven alone knows how much good we could do in this country if we scrapped that foreign aid altogether and spent all the money on nurses, teachers, schools, and everything else that is lacking in our nation.

Savings do need to be made, and the first thing we should be doing is saving our own country from falling apart, not gloating about savings that barely cover the additional costs of our dramatically increasing foreign aid for a mere year.