Prophesying Doom

It's often tempting to prophesy doom: it's eye-catching. Hyperbole is the stock in trade of our now saturated air-waves and other news media because in order to stand out from the deluge of information mild irritation needs to be fury, setbacks need to be catastrophes and so on. 

I do think, however, that there is a serious risk of doom for the UK over the next few years. 

Why? Since the formation of the coalition government and the Comprehensive Spending Review (CSR) we have seen a wave of policy changes and decisions that frankly the press and the public have struggled to keep up with. We have witnessed both a very large volume of changes put in place at a very rapid speed. 

Volume and speed of change aren't necessarily bad things in and of themselves, however they make changes more difficult to implement. But in addition to that my reason for prophesying doom is that all these changes will interact with each other to multiply and warp and produce greater and more varied consequences than first imagined. 

My fear is that the combination of large-scale public (and private) sector redundancies, enormous cuts to both benefits (especially housing) and social care budgets, sharp increases in the cost of transport, cuts to universities, increases to student fees, the saga of Regional Development, a cap on skilled migrants and overseas students and the decimation of Local Authority budgets (more on this anon) will be greater than the sum of the parts and that, moreover, there has been little thought given to how these decisions will interact on society and the economy. 

I can't predict what the combined effect of these changes will be, but it would be heartening to think that someone better qualified than me had given some thought to the systemic implications of the CSR.