The moment at which I felt disgusted to the point of physically ill yesterday was when a couple of folks alerted me to the real facts of George Osborne’s “paid off World War 1 debt” line in the Autumn Statement.
This is the heads-up. Osborne said: “This is a moment for Britain to be proud of. We can, at last, pay off the debts Britain incurred to fight the First World War. It is a sign of our fiscal credibility and it’s a good deal for this generation of taxpayers. It’s also another fitting way to remember that extraordinary sacrifice of the past.”
Setting aside the fact that it was a pointless slaughter and not an extraordinary sacrifice, it now turns out to be, um, a lie. What he will actually do is exercise the Treasury’s call option, and pay anyone/thing that wants to cash those bonds back in…..but in gilts, not in cash. As we borrow around £100 billion per annum, he no more has the real money to pay off that loan than Evangelos Venizelos does. He will, effectively, be using his near-the-limit bank overdraft to cancel a credit card and convert one inefficient debt into another much cheaper one, given the sovereign yields that pertain in this, the mad world of 2014.
So the Chancellor of the Exchequer of the United Kingdom pissed on the dead bodies of naively dutiful men who died for nothing, in order to announce a repayment which was nothing of the kind.
Now you may think I should make more of an effort to crouch down on all fours and see this from Osborne’s viewpoint, but I’m afraid that isn’t my way. Last March – in the runup to the real Budget Statement – I wrote this piece asking whether anyone quite as depraved as George né Gideon Osborne should be holding such High Office. I think it bears re-reading, but of course asking such a question today is pointless….because the people with the power and the munnneeeee will simply stare at one goggle-eyed, before eventually asking, “Er, and your point is exactly?”
It would be difficult to calculate the full depth of mendacity George Osborne displayed at the Dispatch Box yesterday. All one can do is summarise: he’s missed both his deficit and debt targets, and the economic imbalance is even worse than it was when he entered the Treasury in May 2010. Further – despite evasion and denial by Camerlot on a scale never seen before even in the worst utterances of Harold Wilson – the simple truth is (as the ONS clearly recorded yesterday) that the vast majority of people in work are worse off than they were five years ago, and the ‘recovery’ is running out of steam. As I predicted seven months ago, the Government faces a nail-biting four months, during which it must pray that little or no reality peeps out from the thinly camuflaged dung heap.
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard is quick out of the blocks this morning on the subject of reality: ‘For sheer brass,’ he writes, ‘it is hard to beat the mellifluous assertions of the Chancellor. “We do not shy away from the problems that remain unresolved in the British economy,” he began. From there George Osborne escalated to an outlandish claim. “Out of the red and into the black for the first time in a generation, a country that inspires confidence around the world because it seeks to live within its means.”’
Quite rightly, AEP concludes that behind this arrogant tosh, the UK is living well beyond its means, that the recovery ‘is built on sand’, and it ‘simply isn’t durable’ because no real investment is being made in plant modernisation. As always with the Tories, the window dressing is excellent, but behind that, the shop’s central supporting beam is riddled with worm. As for Labour, it too is devoid of ideas. If the Draper’s genes make him good at shop-window art direction, Ed Balls’s moronic inability to analyse would doubtless lead him to buy tons of stock, and then look surprised when the roof fell in. His performance yesterday was risible: it drowned any discernible structure in detailed rhetoric, and – Tory bench noise rudeness notwithstanding – promised no change of plan, merely wishful promises of somehow marrying minimum wage ideology with neoliberal wage suppression. The two men illustrated my continuing LABoraTORY mantra: neither have anything solid to bring to the party, and both are dissemblers of the worst order.
Britain deserves better than this. But it is up to the citizenry to get it…and only we can do it: nobody else is going to help.
The Slog 