There is the old pre-pc story about a brilliant black gladiator who defeats every challenge put before him in the Roman amphitheatre. Eventually, the racist emperor buries him up to his neck in sand, and lets a raging bull out into the arena. As the bull powers down towards the hapless head before him, the black guy dodges the horns and bites the bull in the balls. And the emperor yells, “Fight fair yer nigger bastard”.
Read what follows and draw your own conclusions.
The banks lent £6billion less to SMEs in the last quarter than the one before. It’s yet another sign of the British entrepreneurial economy roaring ahead. Just think, all that dosh we gave to the banks and the City in QE…but it didn’t translate into business output at the innovative end…also sometimes called ‘the future of Britain’. Could this, we wonder, be anything at all to do with our real output still being one sixth of our service businesses? Should we, I dare to ask, just cut out the banks, and give huge tax breaks to every SME in the country? Silly-billy Ward, shut up.
Anyway, it’s just me and my incessant cynicism, as a bloke in 2006 once called it. Lehman I think his name was. The real truth of this situation is, no doubt, that either (a) SMEs don’t want any dealings with banks after the RBS years of invisible fraud, and/or (b) with the economy at full ahead both, why on earth would they need finance? In which case, bankers are irrelevant and should all be shot as a ludicrous overhead. Things can only get better.
It really could be that Nobsore’s right you know, it really could: for instance, I read that zero hours contracts have doubled. And this too must surely be a sign that we are approaching zero hour at at exponential rate of acceleration. Blast-off will surely follow, and then the British economy will burst through the stratosphere on its way to Mars. Down here on the planet, however, there will be nothing left behind, and so we shall all be working zero hours for no money. Which will be perfect, because just over a third of those on zero-hours contracts want more hours, according to ONS data…but probably not for no money. Everyone will therefore by happy not to need any more hours at all as they can’t make any money working them. This Conservative majority is looking bigger and bigger with every piece of great economic news that comes filtering down, following distillation by the Cameron Infamous Pigeon Whisky consortium. Obble dibble habble buckle.
Around 33 homes are being bought for more than £1million every day in England and Wales, proof positive that the Government’s long term plan is working. If you’re a twitterati, then you’ll have noticed that austerity has reached Number Ten, and the tweeting regiment has been cut to one, a fairly lazy bloke who only ever tweets the same thing. Somerset underwater, proof positive that the Government’s long term plan is working. Mark Carney guilty of pig-sticking, proof positive that the Government’s long term plan is working. And so forth.
So to put the Mail factoid above into proportion, new audit data from Halifax and Nationwide show that between February and March this year, prices went down by 0.4%, bringing the average price of a house to £169,124. Which is, as you know, under 17% of the price of a one million pound house…of which 33 are sold every day. There are 23.5 million dwellings in England and Wales; you could sell million quid gaffs at that rate every day for a year before even half a percent of the housing stock had become involved. All this suggests that there hasn’t been a housing bubble at all, proof positive that the Government’s long term plan is working. However, in the South East – where a horribly humungous number of Tory voters live – house prices didn’t fall by 0.4%. Oooooooh nooooo: they rose by 17.7% in London, 8% in the nearest Home Counties, and 7.7% in the equally Conservative Eastern counties. They didn’t rise much in Leeds, Manchester, the West Midlands, Liverpool or Sheffield….towns not renowned for their strong Tory sympathies. Proof positive that the Government’s long term plan is working.
The Slog 