Britain's military braced for sharp spending cuts

The most important part of the story (IMHO) is further down:

"Ministers in almost all departments have been asked to prepare cuts of up to 25 percent to their budgets...Only the National Health Service and international development department are protected from the drive to cut Britain's national debt"

They could cut the Defense budget to 0 and still have problems. As here, the problem is entitlements, not defense. Defense is a legitmate Government function.

The end of Britain.

For these people:

Try this:

In his emergency Budget this week, Chancellor George Osborne announced he was cutting public sector expenditure by 25 per cent. Unions have declared the cuts irresponsible. But are they? Here, one employee for a large inner London authority lifts the lid on the culture of inertia and incompetence at his workplace. The Mail knows the true identity of the man - a graduate who has been a planning officer for eight years. But to protect his job, he is writing under an assumed name.

Monday morning, it’s 10am and I’m late for work - but there’s no point hurrying because even though I should have been at my desk 30 minutes ago, I know I’ll be the first to arrive at the office.

Sure enough, the planning department is a ghost town.

Our flexi-hours policy means that employees can start any time between 7.30am and 10am, but council workers like to treat that as a rough guideline rather than the contractual obligation that it is.

Feet up: Life is a breeze at the whistleblower’s council office, where staff take six months’ sick leave and enjoy very flexible hours
I’m a senior planning officer: it’s my job to inspect buildings, grant planning approval and to guide members of the public looking to alter their homes.
Our department has 60 employees and - until last Tuesday - a budget of £22million.

That is $500,000 PER PERSON !!!!!!!!!!!!

“I’ve been there for two years and in that period the only time I’ve ever seen every employee present and correct was at the Christmas party.
At least ten people will be off sick on any one day. The departmental record holder is Doreen - she has worked a grand total of eight days in 14 months. !!!!!!!

Doreen must be the unluckiest woman in the country.

In the past year and a half she claims she has: fallen victim to frostbite; been hit by a car; and accidentally set herself on fire.
But she’s really pulled out all the stops with her latest excuse:

witchcraft.

That’s right, Doreen believes somebody in Nigeria has cast a spell on her and that it would be unprofessional of her to attempt to do the job she is paid £56k a year for while under the influence of the spell.
She has already been off for four months on full pay. I’ve no idea how long this spell lasts, but my guessing would be six months to the day - the exact amount of time council employees can take off on full pay before their money is reduced.

But having just eight weeks of full pay left won’t be a problem for Doreen and the rest of the council’s sickly staff - they’ll simply return to work when the six months is up, put in a day or two’s work and then go off sick for another six months on full pay again. Easy.

Of course they have to provide sick-notes from a doctor, but as you can buy fake ones online for £10 it’s never proved a problem.

There are procedures in place to address attendance, but nobody ever follows them through - chances are the person whose job it is to monitor sickness is probably signed off himself.

Some human resources managers, usually new to the job, do try to take action - but it mostly backfires.

A ‘sick’ colleague spent three months in Marbella Spain in a rented villa:

All credit to the bright-eyed young HR manager who, last year, wanted to dismiss a senior employee who had been off sick for three months.
The employee had still been using his company mobile phone, from Marbella.

However, the employee was able (with a little help from the mighty Unison union) to argue that there’s no reason why ‘sick’ people can’t rent villas in the Costa Del Sol.

Maybe they should cut Doreen instead.

Probably get an F-35 just for her cheating ...

Europe has disarmed in order to pay for their massive socialist entitlement programs and inefficient bureaucracies. And, why not? The United States is the guarantor of their freedom and our military will protect them from the third wave of Islamic expansion.

Except that we won’t. Obama is intent on disarming as well. The Democrats have always held Europe up as their model and their goal and we are already on our way. So, Europe will fall to the Islamists. I wonder where they will go next?

They could cut the Defense budget to 0 and still have problems.

Such is the depth of the problems faced.

There are real problems with the NHS, but they are not the ones that most Americans think. Its not the rationing - all health care everywhere has resource shortages. Its not even the waiting lists - which is counterbalanced by not having to worry about premiums shooting up to unaffordable levels if you have a history of acute medical problems.

The main difficulty is the political one that because 1.4 million people work in the NHS and it is a "caring" service, it has enormous political clout. I'm quite sure the current British government would like to take the axe to the NHS. They know there are savings to be had in the gross inefficency and duplication of effort that goes on. But it is politically impossible for them to do that. Now the function of the NHS is to provide medical care, not dictate political economic policy, but they do.

The tragedy is that the people who do the real work in the NHS have a lot to complain about. Because the NHS has a virtual monopoly on health care in the UK, NHS managers can pay their staff pretty much what they like. Not senior administrators and surgeons of course, but junior doctors, nurses, porters and janitors - they do long hours, often on shifts, for financial remuneration that would be shocking by American standards. Yes these people are the Union's foot soldiers if there is the merest hint of any move on NHS budgets.

The biggest problem with socialised healthcare is not the quality of the service you get, its the fact that you can't get rid of it once it is instituted.