For us Maltese, today is a day like any other. But not for the British.

Today is Spending Review Day, the day in which the coalition government is due to announce hard-hitting austerity cuts all over the country. A day, in short, of cries and tears.

Already yesterday, British Prime Minister David Cameron announced the ‘retirement’ of our dear loved friend the Ark Royal. After that, Britain will be without any aircraft carrier for some 10 years until two new ones are built and even then, one of these two may be sold.

But it is not just in defence that the cuts will be made. There has been much talk about the government bringing some sort of order into the social security spending and various options were being considered. Perhaps the more extreme one will be that which will see a capping on the amount of social benefits that a person, a family unit, can get. The British social security system is world-renowned for being full of lacunae and people who do not merit to get social benefits, not just get them and get away with them, but are also never found out.

It may well be that the raft of government measures that the British government is due to announce today will take some time until they become effective. People are already speaking of the government taking away Christmas this year since that would be the time when such cuts come into effect.

Other cuts will affect the infrastructure and still other cuts will cut down on the education expenditure.

Even before these cuts are announced, and even when the British public well knew from before the election, that austerity cuts will have to be imposed (and in fact, Labour lost the election because of its poor economic management while that was one specific reason why the Conservatives, and the Liberals were elected), still there is rising anger among the British public. Many have seen the way the government has treated bankers and their fat bonuses even when the banks were a major cause of the crisis and are extremely angry that the government is rewarding those who stoked up the crisis and punishing those who did not cause the crisis.

Moves are already in place to lead to a series of industrial action. The coming weeks will see whether the unions have had their backs broken by Margaret Thatcher and not much mended by Tony Blair or whether they have generated a new breed of resistance.

Meanwhile, across the water, the French are well in front in the riots’ stake as the marches have doubled in so many French cities and petrol stations are running dry and roads are being blocked.

We’ll see where this will take us. Until some months ago we thought that only the Greeks would be protesting, and when they did, that sort of confirmed our predictions. The Greeks quietened down, but now it’s the turn of the French and the British and for vastly different reasons. The French, for instance, are making all these protests because the Sarkozy government is raising the retirement age from 60 to 62.