Comprehensive Spending Review Blues

As a very debt-adverse person I quite approve of trying to cut down on all that interest that we seem to be paying. As a household where neither of us pay higher rate tax we will get to keep our child benefit. As an OAP (with the sort of index-linked pension that was phased-out about 30 years ago) my mum gets to keep her free TV licence and winter fuel payment as it would be too fiddly to think of a way of taking it away from her (her tax return?). As an environmentalist I welcome the Green Investment Bank. As the daughter-in-law of a man with Parkinsons I don't need to worry that he will be taken off invalidity benefit and sent back to work as he is now 65 (had they interviewed him he would definitely have tried to bluff his way back in, preferably to a job that involved wielding heavy implements). Sigh of relief and happy then?

No of course not. I am worried about everything. All the local authorities that are going to lose money will cut the grants that provide core funding to the voluntary sector no matter what David Cameron says about Big Soc., the local dementia day centre is shutting, far more people will need advice on how to cope with less money from housing and welfare benefits but there will be fewer advice centres and no legal aid to provide it, eighty thousand families will have to move out of London to live in B & Bs in Hastings and Luton, and the Environment Agency will no longer have enough staff to inspect polluters. We even have to worry that too many cuts will lead to a double dip recession with less people paying taxes and then we will end up in as much trouble as the Irish.

So I am going to have to take a closer interest in the figures, read Robert Peston's blog avidly, and try to work out whether we can cut the deficit by clamping down on tax avoidance, bankers' bonuses, digestive biscuits for civil servants and red tape for charities and small businesses (even though most of the money I earn is from helping them to cope with it). But no doubt I will never get my head round it so I am going to spend the next few years feeling cross but without the economic understanding to fight back articulately.