The news is still all about Covid19….and not the machinations behind it. Yesterday’s UK Budget showed, without any room for doubt, that common sense and Common Good in government have been abolished in favour of over-reaction to a microscopic health threat. Our “leaders” have wilfully invited disaster, and the citizenry have largely accepted it without question. Britain needs a functional Opposition, and fast.
The very term ‘the Budget’ is profoundly misleading, in that the departmental budgets won’t be finalised until the end of March. But this one was always certain to be more smoke and mirrors than usual, because we are, as it were and so to speak, broke. So it is perhaps no surprise that, in the cold light of Friday morning, we don’t know:
- Whether the Government’s borrowing requirement for 2021-22 will be anywhere near enough to make up for lost gdp
- What the NHS budget is going to be
- Why the furlough scheme is being extended beyond Lockdown’s end
- If any of Rishi’s handouts will make the slightest dent in anyone’s personal crisis
2020 borrowing went through the roof to £355 billion, which will be cut to £234bn in 2021-22 – if there are no further lockdowns. That’s a very big “if”. But even at that cut level, nearly half of it will need to be borrowed – Sunak having said that total fiscal support will reach £407bn – worse than the worst year of the 2008 financial crisis.
The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) predicts a faster and more sustained recovery than initially expected – but not why: odd in the light of a lockdown extended far beyond expectations. It also writes of ‘long-term scarring’ which could mean anything. However, relax – the growth will reach 7.3% in 2022. Or not.
Take a look at this somewhat embarassing chart prediction from the OBR:
You can see that in Q1-20, Britain lost 22% of its gdp. But the OBR gaily went ahead and foresaw things still ticking along nicely, when in reality we lost another 12%….and won’t get back to where we were until Q3-22, thus losing another 11%.
These are very big numbers. A quarter of normal (2019) gdp comes to £750 billion. That’s over three times Rishi Sunak’s borrowing requirement. Like it or not, there’s a wealth-generation shortfall…and that means some serious budget cuts.
This is the Chancellor on duty at Covid Corner recently. Spot the emphasis. Not only has Covid19 devastated NHS cancer care, but 40% of all Covid-free hospital admissions became C19 cases after they went in. Maybe we need protection from the NHS. (The other two elements on the Idiot board say stay home, save lives. We’ve had one of the world’s strictest lockdowns….and are in the Top 4 on deaths per million).
And talking of Lockdown, Rishi has extended the furlough scheme until September – which, research suggests, comes three months after the scheduled June exit from House Arrest. There are two possibilities here: first, Lockdown is going to be extended; and/or furlough extension can be used by the Treasury to record the unemployed as not unemployed. It’s an old Clinton trick, but it just might work. However, my guess is that the first priority of larger-scale business will be to reduce headcount, after a year in which losses have been massive.
So finally, let’s talk about whether Mr Sunak’s benificence is going to be enough to make up for a life needlessly spent in hellish boredom and lost income at best….or bankruptcy at worst. He has unveiled a £5bn Restart Grants scheme that will provide Covid-hit firms up to £18,000 to boost their survival chances, confirmed extra funding for apprenticeships with a cash incentive to take on apprentices boosted by £1,000, and extended the £20 boost to weekly Universal Credit payments for a further six months.
Time for some perspective. Five billion to repair 750 billion of lost business. A grand to help an SME find money to train people. And twenty quid a week for six months to replace a lost job. Add all that up, and it comes to less than the Green Carrie puffery about the Bank of England being given a new monetary policy remit with green goals to ‘help tackle climate change’ and a green savings bond aimed at retail investors to help raise money to drive the transition to net zero carbon emissions.
And let’s not forget the vaccination Salvation Army who get an additional £1.7 billion to continue jabbing people….and releasing stats to show how they have cut the case rate, when there is no causal relationship between the two at all at the moment.
The Establishment is red hot about releasing spurious Covid data, but less than diligent in the area of Virusecrecy. This from the BBC:
More than 20 million people in the UK have received at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine – part of the biggest inoculation programme the country has ever launched.
They’re not vaccines and they most definitely are not inoculations, but let’s pass on that one and ask a more pressing question: how many fatalities have occurred within 36 hours of vaccination? Twenty million is a quarter of the population, and the number has a lot of noughts in it. The time for ‘almost none’, ‘not many’, ‘perfectly safe’ and “Miyee nime is Mik’ul Caine” is long gone. We should now start demanding some facts.
News coming in from Norway reports the deaths of 23 patients shortly after receiving the vaccine. Thirteen of the deaths have been investigated so far, and the conclusion is that common adverse reactions of mRNA vaccines, such as fever, nausea, and diarrhoea, may well have contributed to fatal outcomes in some of the frail patients. If the very people most vulnerable are really falling off the perch after vaccination, then we need to cut the woffle and crunch the data.
The abject failure of the Johnson Administration to re-examine its Covid containment strategy has resulted in failure to protect the NHS, failure to protect the vulnerable, failure to control spending, and failure to perform either cost/benefit or safety analyses of half-baked scifi vaccines.
The Budget we got yesterday is the reaping of the sowing thing: taxes are going up, borrowing has exploded, the help for business is largely deckchair rearrangement, and the growth assumptions simply don’t tally with the lower consumption that always accompanies lower personal disposal income.
Small businesses and the average citizen are now going to pay for the suspiciously appalling advice, expensive waste, uncommercial panic, heavy-handed policing and interest conflicts exhibited by the likes of Hancock, Johnson, Whitty, Vallance, Ferguson, Dick and Horby in particular – along with Parliament, Whitehall and the media in general.
But then, the astonishing loss of sanity by citizens across the world over the last fourteen months has diluted the point of posts like this one. We have all been turned over by the greatest agitprop and unaccountable censorship operation in history. It has shown not so much that liberal democracy is unfit for purpose, but rather that the electorate is unfit to protect it.
A globalist, banking and billionaire one-in-a-thousand minority have turned The People into unwitting suicides. If those who are awake don’t start building a peaceful but determined resistance very soon, the totalitarians (who come in all the colours and all the sizes) will coast to everlasting victory.
PS Rishi Sunak doubled the contact-free smart card payment limit to £100. There’ll be celebrations in the banking boardrooms tonight.
The Slog 