Lies, damn lies and politics

I myself for one never bought into the “buying our way out of a recession”. Like most sensible, sense and middle class people; when times get tough, I cut back on my own spending. I do not think, much as the government was encouraging, hmm… I have no money, I know what I’ll do, let’s go out and spend more money I don’t have. And whilst I understand this, I can also see the government’s perspective to keep spending at the start of the recession. When times get difficult and general public spending stops all that is left is the government. Without this spending all business in the country would have freefalled, and it is exactly for this reason every government around the world continued spending through 2008. Countries that stimulated the hardest, such as South Korea, ended up coming out of the recession first.

Clearly, a small debt run up to keep the economy trading is worth paying back in times of prosperity. However, this assumes that the government is prudent enough to keep the economy alive. What we actually have is a government that has cut spending right across the board by 20%. Cuts that Lady Thatcher would be proud of from her hospital bed. Can anyone guess the last time we had cuts of 20% across the board? The Thatcher years? Nope. World War II? Guess again. The correct answer is actually 1918.

In 1918, the country was in the face of the world’s largest economic crisis it had ever seen. The Conservative-Liberal coalition government of the time decided the only way to possible deal with all of this debt was to pay back as much of it as quickly as possible. Now I’m not saying that history repeats itself but it certainly has a rhythm and a tendency to rhyme and at this point are any alarm bells going off?

So, what happened in 1918 when the Tory-Liberal government tried to pay everything off. Well unemployment sky-rocketed from 6% to 19%, that’s nearly one person in five without a job or income. As more and more families could not pay the bills or meet the cost of living national debt rose from 114% to 180%.

So despite the benefit of hindsight from previous (near identical) crashes, advice from the Financial Times, 2 Nobel Laureates (that have successfully predicted every step of the recession) and countless other experts at the treasury at their disposable Osbourne and Cameron have ignored all advice. Instead choosing blindly obeyed the ideological precepts they learned as baby Thatcherites: slash the state, and make the poor pay most.

Amazing during Osbourne’s speech on his spending review he successfully managed to rush through it so quickly he virtually avoided mentioning anywhere that would suffer any cuts. Say nothing whilst the nation is watching and cut, cut, cut in the privacy of Downing Street.

Hidden beneath the countless stats, is a hard cold reality. PriceWaterHouseCooper, one of the country’s if not the world’s leading consultancy agencies estimates that these spending cuts will cost over 1 million jobs. And that’s before all the other cuts.

The £30/week for the poorest students wanting to stay on to do A-levels rather than go straight from school to work is gone. So, the poorest can no longer go to college.

The old and fragile who rely upon council services to wash and feed them, have just seen a 30% cut in funding. So what exactly what are these people suppose to do now? Starve to death in their own mess? But then this is the government where Mr Clegg believed that the average pensioner on a state pension lives on £30 a week.

The worst example I am yet to hear of is housing. Housing is a wonderful example of what we should be doing. 4.5 million are stuck on waiting lists, waiting for affordable housing. The average age of a first time buyer is now 37. It is a constant concern for the middle and lower classes. Happily, house building is one of the few trades that can be classified as “multipliers”. This is where they employ a lot of medium wage people, and these people are likely to quickly spend the money and multiply the economy. Osborne has taken all of these numbers, and in all of his wisdom as a result an average of 1 house per week is being built in all of London and the South East. 4.5 million people waiting list and one house a week. You do the math….it’s about 8500 years.

But then, what do we expect from Mr Osborne. The man has an inherited £4 million trust fund in an offshore account (to avoid the tax).

The man has the nerve to say “we’re all in this together”, well yes, it’s very easy to say that when you’ve inherited £4 million. It’s very easy to say that when you’ve allowed the big city bankers walk away with a £7 billion bonus this year of tax payer money.

And just to really hammer home the point. Let’s take the example of Vodafone, one of Britain’s most successful and profitable companies. At the end of the tax year Vodafone had a tax shortage of £6 billion. Mr Osborne quite happily waved this small sum. So, next time you get a bill for council tax or income tax just don’t pay it and see what happens.

From this day forward for every cut in the NHS, education, science, libraries, schools, public buses, prisons and everything else just think to yourself. Could a banker be paying for this? or Shouldn’t Vodafone be paying for this?

On the eve of the general election, Cameron told us: “There’ll be no cuts to frontline services,” “we’re not talking about swingeing cuts,” and “all cuts will be fair”.

When France wanted to raise the retirement age by 2 years from 60 to 62 they had week long, national strikes which brought the nation to a stand still. Cars were burnt in the street. Riots were had.

Cameron, Osborne and Clegg have all but signed the death sentence on the country, and what will the British public do. What the British always do. Take it on the chin and in a chipper tone mumble “Dash bad luck ol’boy”

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