bwfc1874 wrote:I'm not your mother and I'm not going to spell it out for you. Everybody else in the country understands the term pre-war, catch up.
I always think of pre-war as being before WWII.
If we are talking about this then shrinking the state to this level would be absolutely staggering and all but impossible to achieve without causing riots on the street.
For instance the NHS only came into being AFTER the war (1948).
In fact the whole of the British modern day society was born AFTER WWII.
William Beverage (Labour) basically built on the building blocks of the previous Conservative and Liberal reform initiatives in the first half of the twentieth century to 'fight' the "five giant evils" of British society of the time namely -
Want - The National Insurance scheme became universal to protect people 'from cradle to grave' - it basically was the birth of the benefit and pension system we have today.
Disease - the creation of a free health care service for everyone - the NHS.
Squalor - the creation of affordable housing for everyone - until Thatcher stopped the creation of council houses and reduced the stock by right to buy legislation.
Ignorance - raising the compulsory education level to 15 years of age - which has been since risen to 16 years of age.
and
Idleness - the change of government economic policy to Keynesism (J M Keynes) which was changed to monetarism theory under the Thatcher government.
So even though two of the 'giants' are now addressed differently from nearly 70 years ago, I doubt very much that any government could save the equivalent it would cost to scrap the complete benefit state, the nations health service and ending education for all 15 and 16 year olds.
Maybe some on here are too young to remember what happened when Thatcher tried to introduce the poll tax (which after all was simply only a means to bring about a fairer way of raising income than the existing Rates system (we now have the Council Tax system) - but that led to riots across the country and the down fall of Thatcher as Prime Minister - and that would be nothing compared to what would happen if such draconian cuts equivalent to scrapping benefits, pensions and the NHS were actually attempted by Osborne or anyone else!
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