Former Conservative MP Sir Philip Davies has questioned whether the Government has scrapped plans to axe 66,000 civil service jobs in order to prevent their programme being “blocked” in Whitehall.
He told GB News: “It’s quite extraordinary, to be honest. Labour said a few weeks ago, there’s no money. We’ve run out of money. In fact, we’ve run out of money so much we’re going to have to take away the winter fuel allowance for pensioners.
“We’re going to have to have an emergency budget, and we’re going to jack up taxes, both of things that we didn’t say we were going to do in the General Election, but we’re going to have to do them because the financial situation is so dire.
“But then we have an above-inflation increase in pay for the public sector workers. We’re dishing out money on overseas aid as if there’s no tomorrow. And now we find out that they’re going to not cut 66,000 civil service jobs that were in the pipeline.
“And this, by the way, is not austerity. The number of civil servants in the UK has gone up by 100,000 in the last five years…which should be of some embarrassment to the previous government, it has to be said, but at least they were trying to do something about it and accepted that the situation got too bloated.
“What on earth is the justification for saying that we still need 100,000 more civil servants now than we had five years ago. It’s completely unacceptable. And it just goes to show that Labour, when they say they’ve changed, they haven’t changed.
“It may well be that the Labour government has decided, ‘look, we don’t want to run into the same problems that the previous government did with the Civil Service trying to block the things that we’re trying to do and so what we’ll do is we’ll appease them on every possible level, and therefore they’ll be enthusiastic about delivering our programme’.
“I don’t know if that’s what they’re thinking or not. But I think we know now why they were while they were whooping with delight when they saw the new Labour ministers, walking into each of the government departments, because they knew that their job was safe.”
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