About

A Thousand Cuts aims to monitor and report on the impact of Britain’s public sector funding cuts in the wake of the financial crisis. While we are not opposed to every cut in public spending – particularly where that spending serves no demonstrable purpose or is unnecessarily costly – there are compelling reasons why Britain should not enact mass spending cuts that hit public services:

- the financial crisis was caused by corporate greed, not the public sector
- as a matter of natural justice, public service workers and users should not be punished for others’ mistakes
- cutting public spending too heavily, too quickly, risks the recovery by adding to unemployment
- economic policy should be focused on tackling unemployment and stimulating economic growth, not causing mass redundancies in the public sector
- perhaps most fundamentally, given that all three parties lied to the electorate about what they intended to cut during the election campaign, the government cannot now claim a democratic mandate to carry out these cuts. For the most part, people were not told what they were voting for

Through our own reports and harvesting links from national and local media and like-minded anti-cuts sites, A Thousand Cuts will help give a picture of the impact of the cuts on the members of the public across the country. We will also examine cases of questionable public spending that could be cut instead of frontline services, and will be open about cases where individual cuts turn out not to have a negative impact.

This site is not party political, and we welcome contributions from people of all political persuasions and none who are concerned about either specific funding cuts or the broader cuts agenda.

To contact us, please email cjayanetti at gmail dot com

Authors:

Chaminda Jayanetti is a freelance journalist who has previously worked for the Islam Channel and Emap. He currently edits The Samosa, a website that received £15,000 of public sector funding from the Equalities and Human Rights Commission; he drew roughly £2,244 in wages from the EHRC funding. The Samosa is now funded entirely by the independent third sector, and is working to operate on a commercial basis in future. He has never been on the public sector payroll. From 2002-2007 he was a rank-and-file member of the Socialist Party; during that time he was also a member of International Socialist Resistance, the Socialist Party’s colourfully named youth organisation. He is not now a member of any political party. He is a member of the National Union of Journalists.