[Frontline services] The smokescreen from Hell

From The Metro:

"We have to make tough choices in public spending and we will need the support of the Labour movement in protecting the front line first..."

What do most people understand by "frontline services"? I'd guess...

1. The NHS. The official stat's show we've got 320,000 nurses @ £30,000 a pop and 120,000 hospital doctors/GPs at £100,000 a pop, that's about £20 billion. Let's give them an equal number of cleaners, cooks, porters, secretaries, geeks and so on at £20,000 a pop, that's £9 billion, plus £12 billion for medicines, plus another £20 billion for occupancy costs and machines that go *ping*, bringing the total cost of the NHS to £61 billion (as against current cost of well over £100 billion).

2. State schools. Ten million school-age children divided by low pupil-to-teacher ratio twenty = 500,000 teachers @ £40,000 = £20 billion, let's double that for school books, food, cleaners, cooks, caretakers, school nurses etc, £40 billion. Universities shouldn't be taxpayer funded, full stop.

3. Armed forces cost well over £20 billion but we could easily cut back to that if we concentrated on defence rather than endless stupid invasions.

4. Law and order. There are about 150,000 police officers (one per four hundred of population) let's assume they cost £50,000 each (including overtime, cars, fancy gadgets) that's £7.5 billion. There are 80,000 people in prison, 10,000 of whom could be deported which apparently cost £40,000 each to keep in jail, that's £3 billion.

Stick on £40 billion for debt interest and repayments and £200 billion for a Citizen's Income-style welfare system to smoothe things out a bit and to show there are no hard feelings, and we arrive at the princely sum of £371.5 billion, less than 30% of GDP, as against planned spending of £700 billion or over 50% of GDP (including eight million taxpayer-funded jobs, FFS!).

That's how you reduce the size of the state without affecting front-line services! I'm not sure which part of this they can't work out for themselves.

See here for further stat's and links.