If Britain Were Greece

Just watched an excellent comparitive piece on the BBC Website
If Britain were Greece.

The journalist has assimilated the facts and statistics of Greece's swinging austerity measures imposed by the Troika of the EU, IMF and ECB into a British context.

Here's a summary below:

Unemployment would have hit 7 million

Half of all young would be out of work

Minimum wage would be cut from £6.08 per hour to £4.74 per hour, or for under 18s, be reduced from £4.98 to £3.39 per hour.

100,000 public sector workers would be waiting redundancy with their salaries meanwhile cut by 40%

1 million public sector workers would be sacked by 2015

All public sector workers salaries would not just be frozen but cut sharply

VAT would go up 24%

Solidarity levy would account for 5% of income

Alcohol and tobacco prices would be increased by 1/3

Diesel and petrol would rise to around £2 per litre, meaning it would cost £120 to fill the tank of family saloon

State and public sector pensions above £800 a month would be cut by 20%

Anyone with a pension above that rate would see it cut by no less than 40%

The equivalent increase in retirement age would see many Brits working well into their 70s

All state benefits would be slashed and strictly means-tested

Defence budget would be slashed by a fifth, meaning the loss of many personel and the likely merge of the army, navy and air force

NHS spending would be cut bu a sixth, leading to tens of thousands of job losses for medical staff

There would also be the closure of numerous schools, meaning thousands of teachers unemployed.

The outlook for Greece is ghastly and is certainly not set to improve any time soon. And all to protect the common currency project that props up the European Union.

Horrifying, isn't it?