I have friends who work for BA and after been made redundant twice in the early 2000 as well as when i was younger, i do know only to well the feeling of despair and depression they will be feeling right now.
there is more than one single reason for the current situation but it must be pointed out tht the last labour Government has to take a large slice of the blame, they over spent on defence contracts over a number of years and left the MOD with a 38 billion black hole in the defence budget, two examples of such overspending were. An extra £2.7bn on the RAF's Typhoon fighter jets, after it was decided to buy 16 more aircraft to meet the UK's contractual obligations under the four-nation Eurofighter programme with Germany, Italy and Spain and £767m on the Royal Navy's two planned new aircraft carriers.

With regards to someone in an earlier post who blamed the cuts, they like many people dont appear to be able to grasp the extent of the current debt situation in the UK.
When Labour left power in 2010 it left behind a budget deficit of around 1 trillion pounds, approx about 71.3% of GDP and rising at an alarming rate, in fact it was second largest budget deficit of the G7 and the fourth highest of the 26 industrial countries .
Much of this was basicaly down to Gordon brown and his Govt borrowing and spending more than what the country was taking in tax revenues etc, something they were guilty of from the day they took office and also during their previous term in the seventies, if this had carried on as gordon Brown intended, had he remained in power, we would now probably be in the same boat as The USA and Italy who have recently lost their triple AAA ratings and face higher interest rates as a result.

No one likes to have less than what they have been used to in the past but the truth is we dont have any choice, including me, i currently run my own small retail busines and the future is uncertain, i have had to slash my margins considerably to stay in competition with the rest and its getting harder.
Its a hard world out there at the moment and it aint going to get much better for a while yet imo.

Before pontificating in future, perhaps you'd better aquaint yourself with the definition of budget deficit

I don't read the tabloids pal. You need to take your red spex off and see what's really happening in this country

You're right kath, it's not in the 100's and times are tough but I'd rather not discuss my personal situation in a public forum

You're talking rubbish mate. Evrything is fine and it's just those pesky tory supporting newspapers making things up

You might want to have a think about why that is and where the problem in British manufacturing largely lies.

Governments of every political persuasion have overspent on defence contracts for decades if not longer. The MOD has been seen as a soft touch by private contractors for as long as I can remember, and has been utterly unable to run defence contracts competently or anywhere near close to budget.

A failure to modernise, invest and innovate over many decades

I'm really sorry for anyone losing their job at any time and I wish you all luck in finding something new.

I would say that there will be many more casualties over the next few years as the coalition actually try to do something to sort out the mess that successive governments (yes, including Thatcher) have put this country in. I'm worried it's too late for the western world.

"Property-related borrowing and lending between financial institutions helped the collected debt of households, businesses and government balloon from roughly twice gross domestic product (GDP) in 1987 to around 5.4 times by 2009, when total debt stood at £7.5 trillion, according to the report.

Despite government austerity measures, the firm's latest economic outlook sees the UK's debt to GDP ratio sticking near historic highs as borrowing hits £10.2 trillion by 2015.

But if the economy does not perform as well as expected, one plausible alternative scenario could still see the debt burden soar as high as 5.8 times of GDP, the report said."

from rllinkrl

We constantly hear how the country is trillions in debt, looking at the news the whole of Europe seems to be in a worse state than us, Africa is in debt too add to that the US is massively in debt. The banks are running at the point of breaking and the stock exchanges are crashing daily...

Quick question, who is this money owed too? If nearly all countries and financial institutions are broke someone must be coining it in, who??

rllinkrl
quite an interesting article

Well unless the definition has changed, or i have missunderstood it all these years, ( it is the amount by which a government, company, or individual's spending exceeds its income via taxes etc over a particular period of time. It may also be called deficit or deficit spending.
In fact The UK now has the third largest budget deficit in Europe, according to the recently published EU’s official league table.
In Labours case this was because, Clearly spending was too high(or taxes to low, god forbid). which is what i said in my post however, i do stand to be corrected if i'm wrong.

Wonga.com??