Will the Nation swallow it?
Later today, George Osborne is going to tell us that his strategy is working. But consumers are trading down on price, Mark Carney continues to warn about housing bubbles and bank instability, youth unemployment is so bad, half of all graduates have no job, and as The Slog pointed out last week, ‘Even if we were equipped to sell desirable goods, the world is heading for an all-time slump. As long as we have nothing to sell and nobody to buy, there palpably obviously can’t be a recovery. There never was…and there never will be until we have a Government in power prepared to face the truth, and with the experience to do something about it.’
George Osborne is a fraudster who is trying to make a recovery out of falling employment hours, nervous consumers, rising trade deficits, falling real disposable incomes, a woefully unbalanced economy, an EU in economic neutral, and China heading for a hard landing. He is trying to make sense out of building more houses in daft places when we are already overpopulated and should be growing more of our own food.
But don’t hold your breath waiting for Messrs Miliband and Balls to offer a reasoned, persuasive deconstruction of his policy. They don’t see the bigger picture either.
Whatever Osborne announces today will be the equivalent of deckchair reorganisation on the Lusitania: Britain’s economic culture has been torpedoed by neoliberalism, and the world economy is spiralling ever more obviously into a slump. Signs of a market top-out in New York are now so numerous, it’s hardly worth reporting them any more.
Let the silly little twerp spout off and hang himself. Whatever he says later, the die is cast: this Budget is irrelevant.
The Slog 