As The Dust Settles On Britain’s Economic Plan, It’s Much Ado About Nowt

Dartmoor

“I had hoped that our fund to help third world dictators buy more S class Mercedes limousines, hookers and shopping trips to Paris for their wives might be slashed to nothing for the life of this Parliament”

The British media is at it again. If you listen/watch/read BBC radio and TV and the mainstream media right across the political spectrum you hear the same mantra. Chancellor swings the axe. Nothing like it since Thatcher. Deepest cuts in living memory, says the Telegraph. The news comics of the left repeat this with ludicrous claims that it’s so unfair, it has to be stopped, and we must take to the streets. The poor will be hit the hardest, as though the poor don’t always get the rough end of the stick.

But take a look at the Wall Street Journal, a newspaper filled with reporters who don’t play the British political game, and you find something completely different. In an editorial, the Wall Street Journal pointed out that the cuts are not really cuts at all if measured in absolute terms. There is a small cut in real terms. So much for the political ranting that the sky is about to fall in.

Listening to the Labour Party lying about its role in this is truly sickening. Labourites have been trying to tell their tame supporters that it is all because of the world economic slump, and the bankers.  Let’s face it, bankers only did what they were allowed to do by the regulators of banking, the Labour government.

Another piece in the Wall Street Journal puts this all in context. In an article headed “Osborne Gets It Half Right”, author Rupert Darwall has some killer facts.

“Over the past 10 years, the U.K’s GDP increased by £160 billion after adjusting for inflation. But government spending grew by £217 billion, one third more than the increase in economic output. During that period, the extra spending on the three biggest items of government spending alone – social security and pensions, health, and education – took 88 per cent of the extra GDP Britain had generated,” said Darwall.

That’s why we are bankrupt. That’s why the money has run out. That’s why drastic action is required. The ConDem coalition has to pin the blame where it lies; the Gordon Brown/Tony Blair stealth plan to recruit a client state is why we are in financial crisis.

Darwall points out that government spending will still increase a bit through 2014-15, but as the economy grows, the government will account for 41 per cent of the economy in 2015, compared with an outrageous 47 per cent now. That’s a result of sorts.

I was looking for some key indicators in the spending package which would show that the Tory-LibDem coalition was prepared to dump silly shibboleths and return some of our policymaking to reality. I was disappointed. Firstly, this was a great opportunity to dump the Climate Change Act, which will impose ever greater and eventually crippling, bankruptcy-inducing energy costs on the public and business as we move towards the truly demented goal of an 80 per cent cut in carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by 2050. Not only did we not get any sense on this issue which won’t make any difference to the climate, the government said it will spend £1 billion on a green investment bank, taking up ideas that banks have already decided make no sense. I had hoped for an end to financing of the spurious scheme to capture and bury carbon from the burning of coal. This scheme not only won’t work, but promises to make it uneconomic to use coal to generate electricity, which of course is the unstated goal of the project. I had hoped that the wasteful and environmental loopy plan to spend kerzillions on a new railway line across virgin countryside to get us to Birmingham 10 minutes quicker would be dumped. Or that the third runway project at Heathrow would be reinstated. No sign of any sense on these important issues.

I had hoped that our fund to help third world dictators buy more S class Mercedes limousines, hookers and shopping trips to Paris for their wives might be slashed to nothing for the life of this Parliament. Instead, the International Development budget was increased by a shocking £4 billion to £11.5 billion. Don’t these people realise that charity begins at home? Not when you seek to grandstand on the world stage with our hard-earned money.

If you were looking for signs that our coalition government might be a reforming Thatcherite one in disguise, there were none that I could see.

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