Are you feeling the recession (yet)?

Yeah. The main casualty so far has been spare time unfortunately. Oh - and hope for the future. Thats long gone.

Sufi, you work in immigration/asylum, is that right? Beeb news today says 61,000 asylum applicants can't be traced because of backlog/under-resourcing...

Colleagues of mine at HMRC estimate the UK's annual tax gap to be in the region of tens of billions. Obviously, more of this could be retained by the government if the department were better funded. But no, of course it makes far more sense to save a few million a year by slashing HMRC's workforce.

Pretty fucked here to be honest. Owe money all over, just applying for jobs, not hearing back. Like others scrounging money when I can by dj-ing or whatever. Thank fuck I own the flat... at the moment.

And for those that missed it, the current bailout plan for Irish banks is expected to cost between 100 + 105 billion euro in total.

The Marshall Plan cost between $81 and $100 billion in adjusted figures.

We're spending enough money on the banks to rebuild a continent and still have change left over...

We're all in it together

Unemployment has stabilised