Austerity? Don't make me laugh! 'Stop the cuts'? Do me a favour! Just check these figures adjusted to 2011/12 rates:
£634.2 billion
£645.7 billion
£647.1 billion (projected)
That is your government's annual spending over the last three years and the smallest amount at the top is at the beginning of their term! Or, as Mr. Ross Clark kindly points out in this week's 'Speccie':
Osborne is no mad axeman but a bodger blundering around with a blunt chisel. Go back further and you can see just how absurd is the notion that the coalition
has turned Britain into neoliberal hell or paradise, depending on your point of
view. In 1975/76, in the depths of economic crisis and shortly before Denis
Healey went off to the IMF to beg for a bailout, public spending peaked at
39.8 per cent of GDP. In 2011/12 it was 42.2 per cent. That year, the then
Labour government spent, in today’s money, £260 billion — less than half what
the coalition will spend this year. In other words, the sub-socialist British
state of the 1970s, with its nationalised car factories and shipyards, was
smaller than it is now.
According to Wiki based on last year's figures, it costs us around £43 billion a year to service that debt but, as George the Toff would be quick to point out, we are very lucky because under his wise stewardship Britain's money lenders are satisfied to take a very low interest rate. Er, well, they did, up until last week when shivers ran down the global spine at the thought that China might have caught financial flu - which they have because their banks are broke! So last week, almost unnoticed amongst the wailing and gnashing of teeth, the interest rate on British 10-year bonds went up and as of two seconds ago when I looked at the front page of the WSJ site they are already up 7.7% today! So last week we were paying something like 1.7% on our borrowings but today we are paying 2.590%!
Well done, George! Not, mind you that he is alone in being totally incapable of cutting even a sponge cake, whatever happened to Dave's "bonfire of the Quangos"?
