Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World

by Adam Tooze

By 2015 Chancellor Osborne would claim to have slashed £98 billion in annual spending from the UK budget. From a maximum of 6.44 million public sector employees in September 2009, the UK public sector workforce would be reduced to 5.43 million in July 2016.18 One million jobs were cut, privatized or outsourced. It was a reduction larger than that imposed by the Thatcher or Major governments of the 1980s and 1990s. Translated to the US public sector payroll, it would be the equivalent of the elimination of 3.3 million positions. Because pension and health spending were ring-fenced, the pain was concentrated above all in local government. As the minister in charge roundly declared: “[L]ocal government is a massive part of public expenditure. It has lived for years on unsustainable growth, unsustainable public finance …. People blame the bankers, but I think big government is just as much to blame as the big banks.”19 Between 2010 and 2016 spending by local councils on everything from elderly day-care centers to bus services, public parks and library facilities fell by more than a third. Britain became a darker, dirtier, more dangerous and less civilized place. Hundreds of thousands of people who were barely coping on disability and unemployment benefits were tipped into true desperation.20 According to the OECD, only Greece, Ireland and Spain were put through worse contractions than those inflicted on the UK.21