People demand services.

They demand low taxes.

There is something of a conflict there.

You pay for what your get, and that includes all the stuff that governments are expected to provide. Currently, the major political parties in the UK are promising no tax increase, paying off the deficit and no cuts in services: efficiency savings, they claim.

What this appears to mean is that two people will do the work previously done by three. So anyone that works in anything funded by the government will have an increased work load. They're also cutting pension and other benefits. One way of doing so is outsourcing - Maggie Thatcher did it when she forced hospitals to dismiss cleaning staff and hire outside contractors. The result was dirty hospitals and assorted hospital spread infections - long term misery for anyone using the hospital, and in the UK that means anyone with a serious illness.  It also increased the unemployment figures and immediate personal misery.

There seems to be a general perception that very rich people work harder for more money and very poor people work harder for less money. Top management is allowed to set its own salary. This is seen as attracting the best people. The 'best people' got us into this mess. They gave (give) themselves bonuses for doing so. 

The Government dealt with a world wide financial crisis by bailing out the banks and financial services. They caused the mess and tax payers paid for the clean up. I don't think we had any choice if we wanted to maintain economic stability.

But why should government employees pay for the bail out? Raise taxes a penny on the basic rate and call it the Bankers' Surcharge. Raise subsequent tax bands in multiples of pennies on the pound - our bankers are an expensive lot. HIgher income people benefit more from  stability in the financial sector than lower income folk - they should pay for this.

The Conservative Party will probably win the next election. They'll respond with fairly savage cuts to social services, like health and eduction. Unemployment will increase. They'll posture about the European Union. Like Labour, they'll demonize asylum seekers and immigrants.

The Tories have said nothing about the other source of the deficit- wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I assume both parties have essentially the same policies - pull out of Iraq while looking desperately for a face saving measure to leave Afghanistan as eighteen year olds continue to die. (Saving political faces is almost as expensive as saving financial services.)

The two major parties are depressingly similar - not least in their refusal to actually discuss the financial requirements of a good education and health system. But they are not the same. Labour has actually improved primary and secondary education. They wasted money on an obsession with testing, but they also made some improvements.

My grandchildren  go to a village school in County Durham. It's not a middle class village. My granddaughter is three and goes for a few hours a week, like my grandson did. He's entering first grade this year. The children and their parents like the school. 

Friends in Kent send their children to the local schools. Again, they like the school and their children do well. There are sink schools and special education is not, I think, very well managed. But the primary education system is fairly universally acceptable and a lot of schools are very good. At this age, the student/teacher ratio is low and the nursery/kindergarden is well equipped. Both of these things are directly dependent on money, taxes paid. Cuts to education, promised by both parties as 'efficiency savings' will result in a worse student/teacher ratio or cuts in equipment. 

Cuts to education are cuts that are never cost effective. Good education is expensive but  bad education costs a lot more in the long term.

Unemployment has a social as well as an economic cost. It is not a cost that should be borne by only a few industries; share the pain. Cut the working hours to thirty a week and let everyone make a little less money.

The only reason to cut the BBC license fee is to please Murdock and Murdock wants the BBC destroyed so he doesn't have to compete with it. Like everything else Murdock does, it's a commercial decision. Compare CBEEBIES and Disney cartoons. Or BBC News and Fox.

Think about Attenborough's Life series; Bill Oddie's Spring Watch, Being Human, Come Dine With Me, Strictly Come Dancing. Publicly funded television and radio stations are diverse in ways that commercial stations are not. The BBC makes a lot of money on spin offs - I, too, bought my granddaughter In The Night Garden toys and my grandson Thomas the Tank Engine stuff. Good - it can help fund programs. 

As an immigrant, there are things about the UK that amaze me: the NHS, the BBC, parts of the traditional education system, the basic social security net. These are things I don't want to lose and I'd be willing to pay considerably more than I do to have them.

They all depend on taxes and the taxes are worth paying. At least have a debate about the issue. Pretending that services will not be affected by cuts in funding is not honest.