We rely heavily on some of those jobs. Front line police, nurses, firemen, binmen, teachers. We do not need all the admin staff or jobs that were created for the sake of it. I have worked in council offices, where the regular 'workers' spend most of the day standing round the water dispensers, chatting. Seems to me, a lot of those should get their jotters...no better than the young people criticised in another thread....doing everyone a favour just turning up....don't expect us to work as well.
No, there are not enough private sector jobs for them to go to, but we cannot afford for our taxes to pay for non-jobs at the moment. To be honest, we never could. Paying for an over-populated public sector helped create the financial mess we are in...if more had been done back then to encourage private sector jobs and less money wasted, we would have been in a better financial state to deal with the banking crisis when it occurred. We need people to be earning their wages producing something and keep the public sector as efficient as possible. It does not generate wealth, it supplies services we all have to pay for, Dead weight is not acceptable.
It is difficult to get the private sector to grow with high taxation, high wages and so many employee rights, when we have to compete with the likes of the Far East where people work 6 day weeks for low pay and have few of the benefits we have. Low overheads make for cheaper products.
However, wage bills over there are increasing now as the people want what we have and this will help level the playing field in time. Some businesses are already moving back here, but not enough as yet.
We also do not generally support our homemade products...we (and our potential foreign customers) want to buy cheaper imports rather than pay what it costs to manufacture over here. So our manufacturing was lost....even essentials like the produce from our agriculture had cheaper options abroad.
We demanded our chickens here,for example, are not too intensively farmed, have happy lives etc, which makes them more expensive to rear, and is a good thing for chickens, then we buy chickens in the supermarket from China, or wherever, because they are cheaper....but then they don't have our regulations. In many ways, we shot ourselves in the foot, but if the govt were to lower taxes, raise tax thresholds, and make it worthwhile for investors and those awful people, the rich entrepreneurs to take the risk of creating businesses over here, that could go a long way to helping the situation.