Who does Gideon Osborne think he is kidding?

First topic message reminder :

This Tory-dominated government claims there is no alternative to austerity. Below, nine leading economists, including a Nobel Prizewinner and one of the Chancellor's own advisers, say that's wrong - and offer a different path:-

Cut VAT back to 17.5%
Christopher Pissarides
Agree financial transaction tax
Jeffrey Sachs
Reduce NI contributions
David Blanchflower
Print money for the public
Sushil Wadhwani
Start a national investment bank
Robert Skidelsky
Lift the cap on immigration
Jonathan Portes
Lend directly to small businesses
George Magnus
Launch a green new deal
Ann Pettifor
Set up a recovery fund
Christopher Allsopp

For the details of each of those suggestions, click on the links on this page:-
http://www.newstatesman.com/economy/2011/10/alternative-coalition

boatlady wrote:-
And yet, there are still I believe polls showing that a majority feel Tories are more to be trusted with the economy - beggars belief

It just goes to show how right Josef Goebbels was when he said: “If you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it.” As soon as this vile government crawled into power, its members not only repeated over and over again the lie that Labour had caused the global credit crunch, but threw in for good measure that the former education secretary Ed Balls was personally responsible for much of it. For the first four months after May 2010, the Labour Party was preoccupied with electing a new leader; in the meantime, those lies became embedded in the national psyche. The first lesson that Labour needs to learn from this is that future leadership elections must be sorted out much more quickly, in a month at the most.
 
Thanks to the intimidation of the BBC by the Tories, and the assistance of their poodles in the press, any rebuttals of the “it’s all Labour’s fault” lie went largely unreported, as did the fact that Cameron, Osborne and Redwood used to criticise Gordon Brown for having too much regulation of the banks. Then we have the ad hominem attacks on Ed Miliband for being “weird”, while of course it’s okay for Cameron to claim “divine inspiration” for his evil agenda. It doesn’t help when a comedian like Bill Bailey, who is supposed to be a Labour supporter, comes out with: “Ed Miliband is like a plastic bag caught in a tree. No one knows how he got up there and no one can be bothered to get him down.” Bill Bailey, will you please go home!   
 
(To be fair to Mr Bailey, he has called Cameron “a congealed, laminated weasel”, while he sees UKIP as “a group of sozzled berks whose policies largely centre round an electrified fence at Dover and a ‘no women in the bar area’ rule.” He says that the only trace of the Liberal Democrats after the 2015 election will be “a bunch of flowers taped to some railings”.)
 
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/bill-bailey-compares-labour-leader-ed-miliband-to-a-plastic-bag-caught-in-a-tree-no-one-knows-how-he-got-up-there-and-no-one-can-be-bothered-to-get-him-down-9254935.html

Now, indeed, is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the Party - maybe starting by concentrating on the issues, rather than any perceived inadequacy in the personality of the leader, who seems to me to be a decent bloke and to have made a couple of very powerful interventions, without resorting to the inter-personal mud slinging that passes nowadays for politics

We'll miss you, bobby.

Got a spare room in Italy to rent out...?     

My impression of Italy is that the population is divided into just two groups:

Group 1 The Politicians

Group 2: Everyone else, who get on with their lives in blissful disregard of Group 1.

several phil. Capestrano, Rimini or Castelione in Teverina

Your not wrong there OW.

oftenwrong wrote:My impression of Italy is that the population is divided into just two groups:

Group 1   The Politicians

Group 2:  Everyone else, who get on with their lives in blissful disregard of Group 1.

Maybe, then, we get the politicians we deserve

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/editorials/for-all-the-chancellors-extravagant-claims-the-rebalancing-of-the-uk-economy-has-a-long-way-to-go-9254582.html

Press comment today

Read this and weep ....
 
https://twitter.com/Independent/status/473125864951934976/photo/1

Weeping, as we speak

Is this a scene from an 18th century West Indian plantation, or something more recent?   
 

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Bp_UG13IAAEVsUp.jpg

Mervyn King: "On me 'ead, son!"

One of the few occasions when any of them have taken notice of anything arriving from the left...

The Law of unintended consequences. Another example. Gideon Osborne's austerity programme badly affected inter alia Britain's brick-making industry. Many kilns closed during the recession.

Current attempts to stimulate the economy by encouraging house purchase are seriously hampered by Builders' inability to obtain bricks for newbuild. Bricks are having to be imported from other EU member countries.

George Osborne has failed in his deficit reduction ambitions

From an article by David Blanchflower:-

Dealing with the public finances was one of the main claims to fame the Tories made before the May 2010 election. Trust us, they said, we will impose our austerity and cut the structural deficit faster than Lewis Hamilton can drive his Formula One car round a race track. We are the capable ones, they said, compared with that profligate Labour lot who were responsible for the collapse of the subprime housing market in Detroit, California, Ireland and Latvia. It was Labour that caused the global financial crisis by its welfare spending, was the inference. We are the “fixers” of the public finances, was their claim.

The plan, according to the chancellor, was to start paying off the national debt by the end of this parliament. Indeed, in his emergency budget statement on 22 June 2010, Osborne went as far as to claim: “The formal mandate we set is that the structural current deficit should be in balance in the final year of the five-year forecast period, which is 2015-16 in this budget.” Don’t fall about laughing.

The plan derailed. The ONS showed last week that borrowing totalled £11.4bn over the month, higher than the £10.7bn forecast by economists, and £3.8bn more than in June 2013.

Read on……
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/george-osborne-has-failed-in-his-deficit-reduction-ambitions--and-the-tories-are-likely-to-pay-a-price-at-the-ballot-box-9628526.html

Couldn't have happened to a nicer fellow.

Incidentally, do the Tory front-bench really think that Fracking is going to be a vote-winner for them next May?

Well, of course, it will generate some employment opportunities, and there will be the promise (never to be kept) of lower gas bills

".... it will generate some employment opportunities ...."

Indeed, there was a discussion on Radio 4 today about fracking, which will certainly flood a proposed site with machinery and associated workers initially, but most of them will move on once the site is up and running.

As for gas bills, I would expect the site exploiters to sell their product to the highest bidder. As Russia does now.

As we know, the short -term and unrealistic nature of the 'benefits' will not deter those in charge of spin from trumpeting them loud as you like in the hopes of fooling the population - and who knows? - they may succeed. After all, they did manage to sell austerity

Ivan wrote:
Print money for the public
Sushil Wadhwani
Start a national investment bank
Robert Skidelsky

Lend directly to small businesses
George Magnus
Launch a green new deal
Ann Pettifor
Set up a recovery fund
Christopher Allsopp

For the details of each of those suggestions, click on the links on this page:-
http://www.newstatesman.com/economy/2011/10/alternative-coalition

For my 2-penn'orth I'd like to see an Investment Bank solely for the purpose of a recovery fund, established with the facility to give away printed money as start-up grants to new initiatives, particularly green initiatives, and local banks establishing themselves, and printing their own currencies to allow local trade of farm and garden produce, arts and crafts, and the facility to trade the local currency back into sterling. It might be a black market economy in one sense but it also might stimulate local growth at this time when all small initiatives seem doomed to be either subsumed in debt or taxed beyond workability

methought wrote:For my 2-penn'orth I'd like to see an Investment Bank solely for the purpose of a recovery fund, established with the facility to give away printed money as start-up grants to new initiatives, particularly green initiatives, and local banks establishing themselves, and printing their own currencies to allow local trade of farm and garden produce, arts and crafts, and the facility to trade the local currency back into sterling. It might be a black market economy in one sense but it also might stimulate local growth at this time when all small initiatives seem doomed to be either subsumed in debt or taxed beyond workability

Much of the above was formerly provided by Co-operative Movements, or by Building Societies, each of which arranged for people to trade through the use of mutual funds.

Both were damaged below the waterline by Thatcher's radical "Big Bang" that put all such power into the hands of the Banks.  Now how did that turn out?[/quote]

I fully agree with you oftenwrong

We can't turn back history and surely knowing what has gone wrong should allow us to return to some of the better ideas of the past.

If Labour had any economic creativity they might start from this. Tory bankers have had no complaints about big bang as they have done very nicely out of it

Labour must expose the fallacy of George Osborne’s ‘recovery’

Extracts from an article by Robert Skidelsky:-

Osborne will have failed by a wide margin to meet his deficit-reduction targets in this parliament. The deficit is likely to be more than £70bn in March 2015, when it should have been zero. This is a prima facie indication that the theory linking fiscal tightening with recovery was wrong.

The theory was that cutting government spending would cause the economy to grow. The growth of the economy would increase government revenue sufficiently to balance the budget over five years. The still-gaping hole in the budget is the result of the economy’s failure to grow to plan since 2010.

But still, Osborne’s defenders argue, the economy has finally started to grow. Is that not proof that austerity has finally started to work? This is a good example of the post hoc, ergo propter hoc – “after this, therefore because of this” – fallacy.

There is no reputable theory that says that cutting public spending in a slump will induce a recovery. In fact, theory tells you the opposite. A slump comes about because the private sector is spending less than it was. If the government reduces its spending at the same time, this will make the slump worse.

But is not the recovery of the economy sufficient vindication of Osbornism? Certainly not. The most important point to understand is that all economies recover from a slump sooner or later. After a lapse of time, the rundown of existing capital stock, together with disinvestment in working capital and surplus stocks, will make new investment more profitable.

For the whole article:-
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/09/labour-george-osborne-recovery-coalition-cuts

Recent events seem to suggest that Labour is less capable than Brooks Newmark of exposing anything ...

With "Europe" suffering financial setbacks right across the region, no Member-Country excepted, if Britain were as successful as Gideon claims, we should now be dictating economic policy to Brussels.

Shouldn't we?

One of the myths which people like Osborne and Cameron perpetuate is that the Tories are 'the tax-cutting party'. They're not, they are tax re-arrangers. They may cut direct taxes, such as income tax, but they can never resist increasing indirect taxes, such as VAT.

Edward Heath introduced VAT in 1973 when the UK joined what was then the EEC. There have been three Tory PMs since and each of them has increased VAT without telling the electorate of their intentions. From 8% in 1979, the standard rate of VAT has risen to 20%, and who would bet against it going even higher if the Tory nightmare continues after next May? (Under current EU rules, the standard rate of VAT has to be between 15% and 25%, so there is scope for another rise or two.)

Direct taxes are more likely to hit the better off, while indirect taxes hurt the poor disproportionately, as the chart below shows. It's not surprising therefore that Tories prefer the latter:-

If the Tories get re-elected Ivan will the amount of tax go up to an average of 25%?

No bobby that is why I have been predicting a Tory victory in the G.E. i'm afraid,

Only people that read that shite Ivan I hope.

The Serious Fraud Office is investigating Tesco over allegations of false accounting. It seems they were counting some chickens before they hatched.

Why was I just reminded of that?

Hahahahahahaha, very good OW,

Next week Gideon Osborne will announce his Autumn Budget, but this week the news is that if you're in your late forties you can't get a mortgage from most Lenders, because you will reach retirement age before completing the repayments.

What happened to joined-up government?

You tell me OW, what happened to it?

Gideon's autumn statement may have been upstaged by the OECD comment today that growth is not likely to be so high as had been forecast.

Yes I read that too OW, ALSO inside fighting in the tory party.

He is looking more and more stressed - pale and distracted - almost as though things were not going too well for him.

I have to say - after my VERY busy week at CAB I want to say - I'm not sorry if he's having a bad time

Neither am I love,

That was an exciting Autumn Statement from Gideon. Slight tax saving if you are buying a house now, but for everyone else it's "Jam tomorrow". Well, not precisely tomorrow - more like four years later.