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

The Budget showed Osborne’s greatest skill: the ability to rebrand his failure as success

From an article by George Eaton:-

For five years, George Osborne has been managing failure. His sixth Budget, like its predecessors, was delivered in coalition, a permanent reminder of how the Conservatives fell short at the last general election. As his party’s chief strategist in 2010, Osborne continues to live in the shadow of that campaign.

This political failure was followed by an economic one. Osborne’s original ambition was to eliminate the structural deficit in a single term. The collapse of growth after he entered office forced him to postpone this goal. Higher-than-forecast borrowing cost the UK its triple-A credit rating, the metric that he had adopted as the defining test of his economic credibility. Few politicians have recovered from such a gap between promise and delivery. Osborne’s skill has been to make a virtue of coalition government by co-opting the Lib Dems’ best ideas – increasing the personal tax allowance, granting new freedoms over pensions – and aggressively rebranding them as Conservative achievements.

It was partly the fear of massacred public services that denied the Tories a majority in 2010, in the most propitious circumstances. Osborne’s wager is that their unexpected resilience will persuade voters that further austerity is tolerable; that fear of a “tax bombshell” and “economic chaos” under Labour will predominate. When the Tories entered office, the belief was that they would be evicted from government on a wave of popular outrage over the cuts. But the wave never came. Osborne has managed failure well indeed.

For the whole article:-
http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2015/03/budget-showed-osborne-s-greatest-skill-ability-rebrand-his-failure-success

I'm sure it must fill you all with confidence knowing that this man is in charge of the UK's finances.....  


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Worries me to death

Why the Tories think they can get away with unfunded spending pledges

George Eaton writes that they believe their economic reputation is strong enough for voters to give them the benefit of the doubt as they promise more money for the NHS and huge tax cuts:-

http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2015/04/why-tories-think-they-can-get-away-unfunded-spending-pledges

The Tories are probably planning an immediate VAT rise after the election.

Cribbed from one of the comments - either that or further cuts to social security will fund these unrealistic promises

Maybe those lying Tories just won't put in the extra £8bn after all, thereby avoiding the need to raise any more cash. Why would we believe anything they say...?

Ivan wrote:I'm sure it must fill you all with confidence knowing that this man is in charge of the UK's finances.....  


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Indeed!

It's coke, tried it once or twice myself when i was in merchant banking (forex) backup many moons ago.

Whilst on that subject.....  

Top adviser to Chancellor George Osborne filmed smoking crack cocaine in drugs den

Prof Douglas McWilliams, who last year ­estimated we would all be £165 a year better off by the election, is seen inhaling crack cocaine through a glass tube at a flat in North London. He then slumps dazed on a sofa after repeatedly smoking on the makeshift crack pipe involving a miniature Martell Cognac bottle.

Red-faced and slurring his speech, he later told the dealer he had “too much” and that he had spent the day on a binge. Two rocks of the drug can clearly been seen on a table beside the dazed professor.

The grainy footage will heap embarrassment on the chancellor and raise serious ­questions about his choice of adviser.

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/top-adviser-chancellor-george-osborne-5251411

It was always my belief that drug abuse was something some of us did in our youth, but that adults with responsible jobs understood that, when your professional skill and judgement are being relied on to provide services and/or advice in a 'safe' way, it is better to remain in your right mind.

Acting in any other way strikes me as a reprehensible form of arrogance.

"Events, dear boy, events."

Harold MacMillan in response to a journalist, when asked what is most likely to blow governments off course.

Gideon's kidology continues with Cameron's visit to Edinburgh today. The more categories of government expenditure which can be allocated to Edinburgh (and/or other Northern cities), the lower will be deficit figures at Westminster.

Gideon doesn't seem to be kidding either the OECD or the IMF, who each think he's overdoing the "austerity" bit to the detriment of Britain's economic growth.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/oecd-tells-george-osborne-to-ease-up-on-public-spending-cuts-plans-10295383.html

Question now is, will he pay a blind bit of notice?

Not a chance boatlady. He is hell bent on hitting the working man so hard that he will be most grateful to get a job that pays a pitence.
Next is to hit those on health benefits to force them onto the employment register to seek any old job/cheap labour and this will exacerbate the numbers seeking work which will make them fight just to earn peanuts. This ploy of course is to assist big business to make more profits (TORY GOD PROFIT) On top of that the Unions are being made vertually powerless and with the finish of the Human Rights, working people will be on their knees, exactly where the Tories want then. Victorian era, here we come again.

We already knew of course that the Tory Party deplores the poor, but it comes a mild shock to the system to find that they have also upset their Paymasters:

http://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/other/hsbc-brand-to-disappear-from-uks-high-streets-as-bank-renames-branches/ar-BBkRkHS

Apparently, I heard on the radio yesterday, HSBC can no longer afford to trade in England because of the unfair and excessive taxation - or some such twaddle

Changing the name of the Hong-Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation back to "Midland" or whatever, is directly analogous to re-arranging deck-chairs as The Titanic sank.

The RBS sell-off: a bad deal all round

Extracts from a ‘Guardian’ editorial:-

"Credit to George Osborne: he can make even a fire sale look like a headline land grab. The chancellor has been all over the front pages, first with his proposal to make budget surpluses a legal requirement, and then with his plans to sell Royal Bank of Scotland back to the market. Trust Mr Austerity to wring two splashes out of one Mansion House speech.

Yet however confidently it is presented, however many background briefings it comes cushioned in, reprivatising RBS is a stinker of an idea. For it is the squandering of two opportunities: a financial waste as taxpayers are set to lose cash on the deal, and a political waste as the government flunks its best chance to make banks work for the economy, rather than crash it over and over again.

In 2008 Gordon Brown ploughed £45bn of taxpayers’ money into RBS. That 80% stake in the bank is now worth about £32bn. Selling it off at these prices is a shortfall of about £13bn. Which coincidentally enough is almost the same sum as Osborne says he must save from the social security budget. As they say on American TV dramas: you do the math. This is almost a textbook case of taking money from the poor and handing it to the wealthy, who will be able to buy shares in a giant bank at a healthy discount in order to meet the artificial electoral timetable of a political party."

For the whole article:-
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/11/guardian-view-on-rbs-sell-off-bad-deal-all-round

The USA may have a Republican administration after the next Elections, in which case "being beastly to the banker$" may not be so evident, and Wall Street will be allowed to revert to doing what it knows best, fleecing the public.

"Summer budget: George Osborne to slow pace of welfare cuts"

The Guardian 08.07.2015


The standard old trick of trailing advance notice of blood and guts only to announce something slightly less outrageous in the event.

The Budget

He is in effect giving a lot of people an unwelcome pay cut that will cause much hardship to families and individuals, and be damaging economically. If he is cutting tax credits and housing benefit now he should have also increased the minimum wage to £9 immediately - why wait until 2020 - really, can anybody provide a reason, why wait until 2020? In fact tax credits etc should not be cut before the minimum wage is increased.

I don't wish to appear to be praising the Tories; but I have argued for years that in work benefits such as tax credits, housing benefit, etc are basically subsidies to private companies that top up the inadequate wages they pay with public money - a ludicrous situation. Employers, not employees, are in my eyes the benefit spongers here.....

.....so to see this being addressed and a promise to increase the minimum wage to £9ph is, I hesitate to say, a step in the right direction; and why didn't Labour do this during the 'good years' before the crash instead of introducing tax credits?

A clever budget indeed - but, as we might have expected, only masking the true effects of what will happen to so many unfortunate people. What Osborne has done is to provide a platform which will persuade all too many people that those Tories have cracked it and are not so bad after all.

The job of Opposition will not be easy against this backdrop of much of the public fawning over such apparent benevolence. Can we hope that Labour will recognise the care needed in picking the right fights at the right times, to avoid presenting themselves as mean-spirited and opposing for opposition's sake. There will be plenty of just causes to champion and patience will be required if the crafty Tories are to be brought into the disrepute they so richly deserve...

Last week they redefine 'Child Poverty' in to day's budget they redefined a 'Living Wage'........by 2020 the government wants to see the low paid receive a 'living wage' of £9ph.......
Last year a 'Living Wage' was defined as one of £9.15ph......So in 5 years it should be?......
Well according to Osborn at least 15p less than last year...........

That 'deflation', with which we are clearly now afflicted, is a terrible thing....

Whilst a living wage of £9ph is a welcome improvement - in that it will save the money presently dished out to subsidise the abysmal wages paid by private companies, and force companies to pay a proper rate, this rate should be for anybody age 18 upwards.....not just for over 25's.

Any companies moaning that they can't afford to pay the living wage need to reduce profit expectations and salaries of the bosses.....or accept that their business isn't really a viable business if they depend on state hand outs topping up the wages they pay.

You have to question why on earth Labour introduced 'tax credits' (a subsidy to private companies) in the first place, instead of raising the minimum wage to a 'living wage'.

As I understand it, the 'living wage' of £9 per hour is to be paid only in 2020 - by which time the minimum wage would have already gone up to about that and inflation will have far outstripped the buying power of a £9 per hour wage packet - or have I missed something important?

I've never really understood why the last Labour government thought tax credits was a good idea - as far as I remember my history the whole idea of subsidising wages was discredited in the Industrial Revolution, when introduction of the 'Speenhamland Scale' manifestly had the almost immediate effect of driving wages down.
You'd think politicians would at least know a bit of basic history like that.

The Tories argued in 1998 that businesses couldn’t afford to pay the minimum wage and its introduction in that year would cause a recession. It didn’t of course, but most people have forgotten that their prediction was wrong and that we had ten years of continuous growth. I would argue that a firm which can’t afford to pay its full-time workers an income on which they can live isn’t a viable business.

Yes, tax credits can be seen as a way of subsidising employers who pay low wages. They can also be seen as a way of redistributing wealth, using some of the tax paid by high earners to top up the incomes of the low paid. However you view them, don’t be taken in by any of Osborne’s shenanigans. The Institute for Fiscal Studies says that thirteen million UK families will lose £260 a year on average because of yesterday’s tax and benefits changes.

The Resolution Foundation calculates that by 2020 a low-earning single parent with one child, working 20 hours a week at £9.35 an hour, will be £1,000 a year worse off. A low-earning dual-earner couple with two children will be £850 a year worse off, while a middle-earning dual-earner couple with two children, each earning £15 a hour, will be £350 better off, as a result of increases in the personal tax allowance. Some families moving on to Universal Credit, or applying for tax credits after April 2017, could face much bigger losses.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-33463864

With the spectre looming of so many already-stretched people poised to lose even more over the years, surely it's a case of 'job done ' for the dual demon 'bowling attack' of Osborne and Duncan Smith...?

What have young people done to Osborne to deserve such contempt?

Extracts from an article by Polly Toynbee:-

Why are the young caught in the cross-hairs of this government? That will mystify future social historians. Most societies talk of them as “our future”, to be nurtured and encouraged, but in yesterday’s budget, yet again they were pursued in a special vendetta of dislike, bordering on disgust.

In his time, Osborne has stripped the young of education maintenance allowances, shrunk tax credits, child benefits, upped tuition fees, cut further education colleges and careers advice while stripping away youth services. But above all, he and his party have monstered the young. Nice young people now stay home until their 30s, unable to find housing. Nice families stay together forever. The children of the rest are blamed and punished.

More details here:-
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jul/09/young-people-george-osborne-chancellor-cuts-budget

"Why are the young caught in the cross-hairs of this government? That will mystify future social historians."

Not at all mystified if they are aware how (relatively) few young voters supported this government of and for Taxpayers in the recent Election.

Who does Gideon Osborne think he is kidding?

I think he thinks he's kidding all of us - so far, he seems to be getting away with it

George Osborne is a magician – despite his record he’s seen as a success

From an article by Owen Jones:-

"George Osborne should be regarded as one of the worst chancellors in modern British history. When the Tories came to power in 2010, Osborne choked off the then gathering economic recovery with an emergency austerity budget. Indeed, the 'recovery' under his 'long-term economic plan' is the most sluggish since the 19th century. GDP per capita remains lower than before Lehman Brothers imploded. Not since the Victorian era have workers’ pay packets flatlined for as long as they have under Osborne.

He promised to eliminate the deficit over the course of a single parliament, but didn’t manage half of it, which was what he ridiculed Labour for offering in 2010. His government pledged to start paying off the country’s debts, but he added more than every single Labour chancellor in history put together. Under his chancellorship, productivity has stagnated disastrously. In much-derided France, productivity is 27% higher. How can this record be regarded as anything other than dire?"

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jul/10/george-osborne-magician-record-success-budget

But the British voter "trusts" a Tory government with the nation's economy. As shown by a recent general election.

"National Insurance may be combined with Income Tax."
http://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/personalfinance/is-this-the-end-of-national-insurance/ar-AAdiTi7

Simplifying tax rules? That would be a novelty, but at least it might stop those snivelling pensioners from claiming ENTITLEMENT just because they paid National Insurance contributions all their miserable working lives!