British Chancellor and keen amateur meteorologist Gorged Frogspawn stunned his G20 audience last night by announcing a breakthrough in analysing the causes of him being fucking miles out on Britain’s much smaller economy and much bigger deficit and much bigger National Debt and much lower manufacturing output.
“On the plane coming over,” he revealed, “I read this really triffic book Noddy & Big Ears go weather forecasting, and while some of the words were a bit long I’m pretty sure now that the major economic growth danger all along has been clouds”.
Enlarging on his theme of two years ago – that unusually heavy rain is definitely implicated as a cause of flooding – Mr Unborne continued:
“I think that in the past, collectivist economic theory has given far too much credence to the wisdom of clouds. Whereas it has been categorically proved beyond any reasonable doubt that wealth trickles down, it seems clear to me that clouds positively piss with rain, usually on my parade. Accordingly, I have asked Theresa May at the Home Office to draw up legislation with a view to banning clouds as the sort of non-violent extremists (NVEs) against whom we should always be on our guard”.
His remarks drew wild applause from ECB and BoJ representatives in the audience. Stewards had to restrain special guest EU military supremo Federica Mogherini. after she threw her knickers at the podium.
But back in the UK, known CIA NVE suspect Mervyn King took a contrarian view, arguing that…..
….and quite possibly Mr Nobsore himself might have had something to do with it.
Courageous as ever, your Soaraway Slog offers this evidence in support of Merv the Swerve:
Yesterday, RBS announced a loss of £2bn. It’s the 8th loss in a row since it was saved by the taxpayer. The shares crashed. Soon afterwards, Chancellor George Osborne put all further sale plans on hold. Good idea really, since he lost the taxpayer a further £1bn in last year’s share sale…having been told by most advisors that he would.
Lloyds Banking Group’s chief executive, António Horta-Osório, Trousered an £800,000 bonus for 2014, on top of his £1m salary. His total remuneration package was £11m including the value of share payouts from a three-year long term incentive plan. Earlier this week, the bank revealed poor 2015 fourth quarter profits. But António Horta-Osório was handedd another £8.5m payout…..and the shareholders were bribed with a whopping dividend…so the share price went up, despite a 7% falloff in profits.
Last year, HSBC rejected calls for its bonuses to be cut in response to the tax evasion scandal at its Swiss private bank. Nobody put forward the idea that those involved should go to jail, but Stuart Gulliver, the bank’s chief executive had his bonus docked by £500,000 to reflect a fine for rigging foreign exchange markets. He did still, however, pick up a salary of £7.6m. He isn’t going to jail either.
Right-wing think tanks across the piece warned Osborne prior to the last Election that he would have to make cuts.
Osborne missed his deficit targets from 2010-15. All of them. Due to the Government’s significant budget deficit, the national debt is increasing by approximately £73.5 billion per annum, or around £1.4 billion each week. As a result of its efforts to balance the budget, the Government forecast in 2014 that the structural deficit would be eliminated in the financial year 2017/18 …and then changed the year to 2018/19 in March 2015…and to 2019/20 in July 2015.
Fully 30% of all the UK government’s debt liabilities relate to bank guarantees and bailouts. A further 20% relate to Whitehall Mandarin pension promises.
But David Cameron dismissed what he called “nit-picking Minnies who would rather talk Britain down than accept our long term economic plan is working”. He told an Operation Barbarossa rally in Huddersfield that “it’s time we stopped denying the obvious, and accepted that Mr Putin is up to his old tricks manipulating these clouds and doing his best to destroy our EU family which he knows is all that lies between him and Calais”.
He urged all Britons to boycott Russian prostitutes, and support his Law to make it a criminal offence to boycott any businesses of which he approved, especially Ospawn & Brittle – and not forgetting the Hobgoblin Sheister Bank of Camerlot (HSBC).
The Slog 