Great Britain Gets a Little Less Great

Massive cuts to the country's social system and military could mean the end of Britain as we know it.

Britain is reeling today, after David Cameron’s government announced the country’s deepest budget cuts in at least 70 years. The highlights: 500,000 civil servants will be fired, government departments will be reduced by at least one fifth, and social services will be drastically reduced. Total government spending will be slashed by CDN$128 billion over four years.

Slash away, says the National Post’s Hugh McIntyre, who calls the massive cuts “exciting” (probably not the word most Britons are using today). McIntyre lauds Cameron for tackling the two most severe long term problems of the British economy: unproductive citizens and government debt.” Britain’s over-generous welfare system has created a class of shiftless citizens who act as “parasites on the productivity of their fellow citizens” and McIntyre estimates that “a third of government workers are not actually productive.” The cuts will force both groups to find productive work, McIntyre says. Of course, he’s assuming that there will be such jobs in Britain’s austere new economy, and let’s hope he’s right.

The Globe and Mail’s Carl Mortished argues that Britons looking for work are unlikely to stick around. He worries that thanks to cuts to education and family benefits, “the real long-term losers are the young professional or would-be professional class … They will struggle to find a job, to afford a home … and to afford children, as the state will no longer provide help. Many will think about leaving Britain.”

The new budget includes substantial cuts to the military, prompting the Post’s Matt Gurney to proclaim “Centuries of British prominence on the world stage has been brought to an end not by Spanish armadas or Napoleon’s fleets or Hitler’s blitzkrieg, but by the reckless spending of British governments on their own social programs.” But as the Economist notes, this isn’t the first time observers have sounded the death knell of the British military: they did it when Britain withdrew forces from the Persian Gulf and South-East Asia in 1968. Only time will tell if this budget means the sun has finally set on the last remnants of British empirical power.