IT TOOK the new Education and Employment Secretary to confirm what many education campaigners could have told him months ago: there is a big hole (of at least £69 million) further education.
We could also save time by telling him that the schools' budget is around £200m short of the cash it needs to stand still and meet the new legal obligations placed on County Councils by the Tories -let alone the atra fending needed to move towards I abour's pledge of reducing class sizes or implementing their promised literacy Savage Universities, too, are struggling to cope with savage restrictions in their budgets while student numbers increase. For a government pledged to "Education, Education, Education" (and not much else), the urgeat necd is to micet monsy. money, money.
But this is not the only arca of front-line services that has been chine. As Socialist Outlook has warnce, local governmical ouak ets, too, have been ruthlessly squezca, with ortal cuts totaning £200m imposed on social services spending across the country, axing support for frail elderly people, children at risk, people with mental sliness and many olner vulner able groups.
These cuts for 1991/98 are just beginning to make themscives tell as Labour takes over the reins of ollice: the new government must either deliver more cash to qwert drastic reductons in scrvices or share the blame for the consequences.
Quangos
While Labour's docile councillors have been nodding through these cuts to avoid any hint of rocking the boat prior to the elec tion, the cutbacks looming in the NHS have been cynically concealed or delayed by the vast nerwork of Tory-appointed quangos -health authorities and Trusts -which control the £43 billion health budget.
With very few exceptions - St George's Hospital in south London and a few Trusts in the midlands - Trust boards consciously held back on announcing major cuts and redundancies that would embarrass their Tory patrons in the run up to the election This artificial calm could never have lasted beyond the summer months at most: but following Labour's landslide victory we can confidently predict a succession of revelations of huge financial problems confronting health authori.
and London's Redbridge & Waltham Forest health authority was perhaps the first of the bunch when, after the votes were counted, it called an "emergency" meeting for May 7 to Ward closures, more redundancies, rationing of services and long delays in waiting list admissions are all likely to be announced in increasing numbers as hundreds of thwarted Tory appointees who covered up the crisis until now pile pressure on Labour for extra cash to the NHS.
The state of the NHS is likely to bring the greatest headaches for the bill gorclamal, with the near certainty that sticking to the * Wan Tory spending limits will bring not only an autumn and winter of embarrassing, headline-grabbing scandals and trolley waits, but another two years of intensifying crisisas the NHS budget is increased by a mere 0.3% in real terms while demand increases - an unprecedented squeeze on health spending never achieved by any government before.
Hospitals
The pressure will be greater in key areas: in London the above average swing to Labour was clearly hinkca to concern at the tarcat to hospitals in the capital, with a staggering wipe-outof Tory MPs in the catchment arcas of two threatened hospitals: Edgware and Oldchurch (Romford).
To make matters worse, Labour