Good analysis of Osborne’s 2013 Budget by Benedict Brogan and Jeremy Warner of the Telegraph. No histrionics, none of the “look at me, I’m the real star of the show” BBC Newsnight gotcha dramatics from the guy chairing the discussion.
Political TV for grown ups…..
Oh how we are laughing at those crazy Cypriots….debt and bank assets as a percentage of GDP equals a humungous 700%. No wonder they are caught between Merkel and Putin…
If you have a banking sector that size you’re asking for trouble – for how can a state guarantee for depositors be credible? If the banks go under the state wouldn’t be able to rescue the savers
How much better off we are in the UK with our own rock solid banking structure – we are just a mere 450% …..
WTF? 450%?
Worse than those basket cases in Spain and Italy?
No problem….you can always trust a British banker….lol
£30b, 20 years to completion – see what happens when politicians get seduced into vanity projects like HS2. Plenty of photo-ops of ministers poring over maps, futuristic graphics, promises of reviving the north….don’t they just love it.
Of course we can predict the reality – costs will double/treble, incompetent management will cause delays, unions will blackmail progress and, by 2032 technology might well have made the whole caboodle outdated.
But just, for a moment, imagine what we could do to improve our shambolic infrastructure with £30b over five years – improve thousands of choke point road junctions with right turn lanes, mini roundabouts, traffic lights. Upgrade existing track and signalling on our existing railway network. Above all convert the A11 into a motorway into the heart of East Anglia. Ensure that the pathetic A303, supposedly the main route between London and South West England, becomes a dual carriageway along its entire length with no roundabouts or junctions. Do the same with the A30 and A38 into the heart of Cornwall and, while you’re at it create a south coast expressway using the A27 and A35.
Our road network has remained frozen for the last thirty years – nothing much has changed (apart from the completion of the M25) since 1980 – which was the year I first began driving regularly in France. In those days the Autoroute network was fairly limited and centred almost exclusively on Paris – and few towns had a bypass. Since then the French have embarked on a steady programme of motorway development and traffic circulation projects that has transformed the whole transport system – as well as a state of the art intercity rail network.
Meanwhile Britain has been asleep at the wheel – often literally.
Still at least we can maybe invest now in a ticket to Leeds by HS2 and bequeath it to our heirs yet unborn to enjoy at some vague time in the future.
That sound? Don’t worry – its Brunel turning in his grave….
Sombre words of warning from the former Auditor General of Scotland, Bob Black and, more surprisingly, from the leader of the Scottish Labour Party, Johann Lamont. Although addressed to Alex Salmond and his SNP government in Scotland the message they convey should resonate not only across the border with England but even further afield in Europe and the USA.
Black called for a debate ‘as a society’ on spending plans for universal services, which in Scotland include free prescriptions and a council tax freeze. ‘We do have to revisit it. Every pound that goes on free services, such as bus passes for well-off older people, is not there to do other things,’ he said.
Lamont followed the same path
‘someone always pays in the end’ for universal services. She added: ‘I believe our resources must go to those in greatest need.
‘If we wish to continue some policies as they are then they come with a cost which has to be paid for either through increased taxation, direct charges or cuts elsewhere. If we do not confront these hard decisions soon, then the choice will be taken from us when we will be left with little options.’
In other words this is a debate that must be held at an adult level.
‘We need to get to a place where we can talk about these things quite frankly and openly, tolerate differences of opinion being expressed, and then allow the politicians to absorb that information, take it forward and develop the policies.
This would be a bitter pill for Salmond and the SNP tp swallow because their chip on the shoulder nationalist rhetoric has never been rooted in economic reality. Instead they have encouraged Scots to fall for the oldest confidence trick in the book – the free lunch.
Not that the Cameron/Clegg coalition in England is much better. For all the talk of “cuts” the fact is that government expenditure in the UK is increasing and will continue to increase over the next few years – but the increase will be a tad less than it would have been if Labour had been re-elected in 2010.
Moreover, although budgets have been reduced across several areas, Cameron has ring fenced spending in the NHS – the biggest “universal free service” of all – as well as pleasing the Guardianistas by protecting the overseas aid budget. In addition, of course, he and his government have dared not grasp the nettle of free bus passes and heating allowances for all old age pensioners, including those who holiday with Saga and overcrowd weekday golf courses.
But it’s not just politicians who have to face up to reality – it is also we the people. As Black has said there must be a “frank and open debate” with no histrionics, no bloody shrouds being waved by producer interest groups like doctors, teachers and local government workers, no sob stories commissioned by the BBC.
The tragedy is that none of the major UK political parties dares to ask the public to face the facts. Like the BBC over Jimmy Savile, our political elite prefers to pretend the problem doesn’t exist and, if they go ostrich, it will go away.
What an opportunity for UKIP to campaign on cold hard facts…..
Sorry but we can no longer afford to pay out so much money for benefits, “free” healthcare, protected public sector pensions, overseas aid, free bus passes for pensioners, arts subsidies etc etc. We believe it is immoral to pass on massive debts to our children and grandchildren. So this is what we promise. If you elect us we will reduce taxation but, in return, you must expect to pay a contribution for public services that were once “free”
I think such a manifesto might not be a political suicide note. Maybe, at last, we, the electorate, want to be treated, for the first time in decades , as adults….
You and Yours is one of several Radio 4 programmes that still have Reithian values embedded within and earlier this week they had a useful and timely piece on “Not Going To University”
On Call You and Yours we’ll be asking do you need to go to university to be successful? More than four hundred thousand students are just starting their new courses across the country, and have committed to spend at least three years and in the region of fifty thousand pounds in getting a degree. But is university the only path to getting solid qualifications? If you didn’t apply or didn’t get in, are you left feeling flat and directionless?
Increasing graduate unemployment and dumbed down degree courses have made a mockery of the “50% at university” pimped by the Blair drones who never really left student politics. So a serious attempt to remove “not going to uni” as a badge of shame is to be welcomed.
Overall there was a great deal of common sense in the programme. But in the course of the broadcast when somebody advised going out and doing any job rather than waiting for something “suitable” one of the presenters agreed about working in a supermarket or McDonalds until something “worthwhile comes along”
Now that is rather odd when you realise that companies in the supermarket and fast food areas are doing very well and are major employers. Retail is also one of the few areas where it is still possible to rise quickly through the ranks via enthusiasm and hard graft without an initial fistful of paper “qualifications”. It is also an honest way of earning money to pay the bills.
But the BBC has always had a rather aristocratic disdain for “trade” and shopkeepers because that is the feeling of the media demi-monde that inhabits and controls the organisation. Selling is a grubby little business in their opinion whereas “making” things is godlike, hence their idealisation of manufacturing, ignoring the fact that stuff is useless unless it’s sold.
That, of course, was the mistake made by the communists who ruled Russia for over seventy years. Lenin and Stalin were so obsessed with production that they forgot that the goods and the crops also had to be distributed. Transport networks and retail systems were neglected – the USSR was always a logistical nightmare.
The result? Goods stockpiled at chokepoints and zero choice for consumers who were therefore forced into buying crap products.
Maybe I can draw a more clearer picture – Thatcher losing in 1983 and Britain under Michael Foot during the 80s = British Leyland cars and BT still dictating who could have a phone…
How about we put it another way to You and Yours?
Not going to uni but you need to earn money but nothing suitable in the pipeline? You could always fill in the time in at the BBC until you got something worthwhile at Tesco or McDonalds…
H/T for pic…SodaHead
Mark Serwotka, leader of PCS, the trade union of Britain’s civil servants, is organising a strike of immigration officials at airports and seaports during the Olympics to highlight the the left’s campaign against the UK government’s austerity measures (or “cuts” as the BBC constantly characterises them)
To be fair he did organise a ballot of his members to endorse his actions and just over 50% supported him…..democracy in action, you might say, until you discover that only 20% of the membership actually voted.
Serwotka is one of the recognised leaders of British trade unionism in the 21st century – a movement which is virtually moribund in the private sector but highly organised, widely spread and extremely militant amongst public sector workers. Moreover these union men and women are no longer horny handed toilers in factories, workshops, docks and mines…..they are almost entirely white collar and they toil at filing cabinets, computer screens and photocopiers.
They regularly seed the audience at BBC Question Time, invariably railing against “cuts” and demanding more money, sharing, with Serotka, the quaint idea that you get out of recession by increasing the size of the public sector because this will then generate “growth” and help those private sector workers who have either lost their jobs or had their pensions devalued……a bit like infesting your dog with more fleas in an attempt to improve it’s health.
Faced with this 1960s sub Marxist nonsense the Great British Public appears surprisingly supine – so let me throw some petrol onto the barbecue.
public service unions would eventually create a new and powerful branch of local government presiding over fiscal matters. He warned that these unions would result in the loss of control of local budgets at the city, county and state levels of govern-ment. To support the ongoing commitments to these employees, other services provided by city, county and state governments would be severely curtailed or taxes would have to be raised.
No, that didn’t come from some hardnosed right wing blusterer but from Frank Zeidler that rarity amongst US politicians, an openly declared Socialist who was Mayor of Milwaukee during the 1950s.
When public sector workers go on strike who are they confronting, who are they fighting? Not some cigar smoking fatcat in an oaklined boardroom – they are striking against you and me, comrade, because the money that goes into their bank accounts comes from that perennial milch cow, the taxpayer. So when they say the government should pay them more they really mean that you and I need to dig deeper into our pockets to keep them at their desks shuffling paper.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the next time some whining public sector worker began to parrot their bleeding heart sob story from the union cribsheet the person next to them got up and in no uncertain terms told them that as a taxpayer and therefore their employer he expected them to cut the crap and do the job the rest of us were paying her to do….
Well, I can dream, can’t I?
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices….
That was Adam Smith’s perceptive dismissal of any trading cartel be it an association of manufacturers, retailers or trade unions because every one of them was constantly seeking to fix a common price for goods or labour to avoid the dangers of individual members lowering their prices and thus offering a more competitive market to consumers. Smith placed demand at the centre of any economic activity
Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production; and the interest of the producer ought to be attended to, only so far as it may be necessary for promoting that of the consumer.
Any attempt to fix or manipulate price outside the mechanism of the market for the short term “common good” would in the long term produce distortions (business closures, repossessions, unemployment, shorages etc) that would cause even greater social misery.
Including the price of credit over the last decade says Steve Baker MP in the UK Spectator
Central banks held down interest rates to stimulate economies with new credit, to push impending corrections out of sight. Those artificially low interest rates discouraged saving and encouraged borrowing but banks can extend credit into existence to cover the gap. With moral hazard endemic, banks loaned recklessly, using derivatives to book unrealised cash flows as profit up front. Some individuals went home unjustly rich and politicians won elections as the system over-extended itself.
Such shenanigans have been blamed on relying too much on market forces and so recently there have been cries for greater degrees of supervision and regulation.
Cobblers
If there had been a truly free market for credit the corrections would have been self generating according to the ebb and flow of demand. Closer supervision and regulation merely makes it easier for powerful elites to impose “adjustments” to suit their own particular political/cultural agendas.
The really important question today is not whether the Bank of England encouraged manipulation of credit markets by self-interested rogues but why we tolerate systematic credit market manipulation by the central banks as a matter of policy: nowhere else in the economic system would we accept explicit planning of the price and quantity of a vital commodity. If it worked, we’d all be communists.
In other words – beware of the man with a plan because it will inevitably lead to your own true interests being subsumed for “the greater good”…as perceived by the man with the plan.
If a man has a plan use another four letter word to tell him where to go…..
David Davies MP at The Commentator tries to explain it in words so simple that even Krugman, Obama, Hollande and the BBC/Guardianistas might be able to understand…
The ‘plan for growth’ is actually a euphemism for borrowing more money than we already are. Sound familiar?
The theory goes that the government borrows money to spend on a big project, like building a motorway. This creates lots of jobs in construction, and afterwards even more jobs are created.
We spend money to make money.
This sounds too good to be true because it is.
‘Growth plans’ have to generate enough money to pay back the sum borrowed, plus interest.
The government is already spending around £45 billion a year on interest payments alone – this is more than the defence budget.
This is actually a low figure, because those lending to us have confidence that we will pay the money back.
Countries that want to carry on spending money they don’t have (like Greece) can no longer borrow money easily and therefore need to be bailed out.
We don’t want to go there.
So, in order to ensure that banks and other countries retain their confidence in the UK’s willingness to sort out its deficit, this means sticking to the plan to spend what we earn.
I think we have learnt enough from the past decade to understand that a ‘growth plan’ is a thinly veiled call for ‘increased spending.’
Of course there is always the money tree……
There are 9.27m people in the UK of working age who do not work. 2.65m are unemployed 3.71m are in education. This leaves a balance of 2.91 million people who are neither seeking work, nor are they in education. This is a 30% rise or 1 million additional people in the final category in the last five years.
We now have 46% of the working age population supporting 54%.
Then there are 6m public sector workers, many of whom play an important role in our society and whose services are vital for the smooth functioning of a modern state. However their wages are fully funded by taxes levied on the private sector. So, remove the 6 million public sector workers from the income generating workforce and you have 37% of the working age population paying for the other 63%.
In other words taxes taken from the wages of one third of the working age population are needed to provide income for the other two thirds.
And when you realise that about 30% of the whole population are either in school or retired and are therefore not part of the working age population you must be as shocked as I am that cruel and vicious conservatives pretend that THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A MONEY TREE.
Fortunately Ed Milliband, Presidents Obama and Hollande, the public sector unions, the BBC and the audience at BBC Question Time know that conservatives are lying. They don’t call it a money tree, of course, they call it “growth”. But at least the latest Greek darling of the left wing media is much more upfront.
Leftist Alexis Tsipras, 37, emerged with the power to block them. Greece, he said, could ditch its spending cuts and renounce its debts to EU partners, yet enlist their help in keeping the euro currency some 80 percent of Greeks cherish.
“Pythagoras didn’t manage to square the circle and god knows these guys don’t know how to either,” said one EU diplomat in Brussels, echoing widespread sentiment in European capitals.
“The Greeks seem to have no understanding of the seriousness of their predicament……
There they go again, pretending that money doesn’t grow on trees, that there is no such thing as a free lunch…
We know our rights.
We want a money tree and we want it NOW!!!!!….
..and the next generation? Who cares…they can take care of themselves…
h/t to a comment at Biased BBC
Of course I am paraphrasing Goering’s famous quote about “culture” – and I also recognise that in a personal capacity I am usually willing to trust the doctor who repairs my hernia or the plumber who fixes my boiler because the chances are they know more about hernias and boilers than I do for they are dealing with them every day.
No, the “experts” I would love to threaten are the ones beloved of the media because they need a gap filled in the programme or on the page. Moreover the “expert” is usually produced to push an agenda favoured by the editorial team – to pimp a company or a political viewpoint or a questionable scientific “theory”.
The “experts” usually dress up their presentation with an impressive display of certainty buttressed with “facts” which on the surface appear ultra convincing. These “facts” are then often machine gunned out with a degree of rapidity that discourages in depth analysis. Certainly the host or editor rarely has the time or inclination to find someone who could present a contrary view.
The result? An initially rather shaky position is offered a framework of reinforcement by inertia and becomes an accepted wisdom. Very often the purpose is to agitate to change something that has worked efficiently and effectively, often for centuries with a view to provide opportunities for a whole tribe of leeches who cannot find gainful employment in the normal world.
Fortunately the “experts” are frequently proved wrong by subsequent events. Unfortunately so often a large amount of time and money has already been wasted in a fruitless search for each specific unicorn.
So – bring on the “experts”……
Less than two weeks ago our UK “experts” were saying this
contingency plans are being drawn up as the Environment Agency confirmed the drought is likely to last until Christmas.
Today they were saying this
The Environment Agency issued flood warnings in the South West and South East as drivers battled torrential rain on the motorways.
Why do we even listen to them. Switch on any TV news programme and there will almost certainly be an “expert” droning on about some topic and usually blaming us, the ordinary everyday folk, for being ignorant.
Remember which company was being singled out for praise by financial guru Gary Hamel in 2000?
extraordinaryaspirations, a willingness to listen to new points of view, flexible organizational boundaries. The managers of —- concentrated on the growth of new markets and industries, andindividual entrepreneurship is highly encouraged
You guessed it…Enron…yes that Enron….and he wasn’t alone in pimping it…
At roughly the same time a certain UK banker was being lauded as a business superman but a few years later the media changed their tune
Remember all the great and the good who really did think money grew on trees….until the recession? I wonder why they got it wrong?
And those brilliant minds who were telling us that those who opposed the Euro were Neanderthal doomsayers totally out of step with the times?
Well now James Lovelock, who as a “scientist”was always treated with due reverence as a top level “expert”, says he got it wrong about global warming when he issued dire warnings in 2006.
There’s nothing much really happening yet. We were supposed to be halfway toward a frying world now … The world has not warmed up very much since the millennium. Twelve years is a reasonable time
Thanks a bunch, you silly old fool – can I have my taxes back, please?
Don’t get me wrong. Every man and woman is entitled to express an opinion and, being human, will sometimes be mistaken. But for self proclaimed “experts” it is never sufficient to “express”…..they must PRONOUNCE as if they have descended from Mount Sinai with tablets of stone. They exude authority and turn a fierce and disapproving eye on any who dare question the validity of their utterances…and we fall for it every time. Even when they are proved wrong “experts” shamelessly slough off their mistakes as a snake sheds it’s skin. Like whores they are forever turning new tricks.
So next time you are watching TV and an “expert” is wheeled in to pontificate on some burning issue remember
1. He/she is getting paid for it and traffic will expand earning potential…everyone will want to go Al Gore
2. So many “experts” have got things wrong every future pronouncement should be accompanied with a large dose of salt
Somebody once defined the etymology of the word “expert”
In mathematics X is an unknown and in plumbing a spurt is a drip under pressure
Sounds good to me…..now, where is my Smith & Wesson?
h/t for violin cartoon
