To remind of O'Rourke's Principle of Circumcision

We are told the following in The Guardian:

Liz Truss wants to inflict more austerity on Britain – but there’s nothing left to cut

Rosie Collington

This is not, in fact, true. For look at the definition of what there isn’t to cut:

Britain now faces a real risk that its welfare state will become a “dual system”, where a sizeable chunk of care is provided by private companies in parallel with a public healthcare system. Some may ask why this matters – if we still have a public health service, what’s the issue with the rich paying for private healthcare? The problem is that dual systems of welfare exacerbate inequality and frequently undermine the quality of public services. Moreover, once the principle of universal free public services is eroded, it becomes more difficult to make the argument for their existence in general. The case for a welfare state begins to fray.

What Ms. Collington actually means to say is that there’s nothing left to cut if the country is to be run the way that Ms. Collington wishes the country to be run. Which is a less forceful assertion than that headline, that there is nothing to cut.

Of course there are things that can be cut. Things the state does badly, things the state shouldn’t be doing at all, even the costs of those things the state must do but currently doesn’t do efficiently.

To give just the one example. Cancelling HS2 would, if we were to allocate all the savings to the year of cancellation, take some 10% of govt spending, 5% of GDP, off the government portion of GDP. So, that’s our first year of 10% cuts dealt with easily enough.

To repeat PJ O’Rourke’s Principle of Circumcision - you can take 10 ten percent off the top of absolutely anything.