Apologies, no time to do this justice but here’s some rough workings to get your teeth into….
Labour’s spending as a proportion of GDP in 1998? 36%
The Coalition’s projected spending in 2019-20? 35.2%
Hardly an enormous difference and yet apparently ‘utterly terrifying’ according to the BBC.
There is an election coming and the BBC has been running a campaign to disparage everything the government does.
The BBC has been extraordinarily critical, not to say dishonest, in its reporting of the Autumn Statement…..telling us we are heading back to a 1930’s depression era economy.
The BBC’s Norman Smith saying:
“While there was a lot of enthusiasm on the Conservative benches and political joy at a lot of the popular measures, when you sit down and read the Office for Budget Responsibility report it reads like a book of doom.
“It is utterly terrifying, suggesting that spending will have to be hacked back to the levels of the 1930s as a proportion of GDP.
“That is an extraordinary concept, you’re back to the land of Road to Wigan Pier.”
I wonder where the Beeboids steal their ideas from…could it be the newspaper they read such as the Guardian in 2011?:
Today the book seems curiously relevant to our own distressed times. An Old Etonian prime minister, in a cabinet stuffed with public school boys, has embarked upon the most radical reduction of public spending in generations, making cuts that have prompted robust criticism of their pace and scale. North and south are pulling apart once more – not yet to the extent where Orwell could describe his journey as if “venturing among savages”, but getting there.
Here is a verdict on Orwell’s book….and probably one that could be recycled for the BBC’s reporting…an enormous pile of piffle…..
Jack Hilton, the man who set him [Orwell] on the road to Wigan, hated the book, judging it a failure and falling out with the author. “So George went to Wigan and he might have stayed at home. He wasted money, energy and wrote piffle,” was his damning verdict.
Evan Davis (Labour) on Newsnight tells us that:
“You have to go back to the depression of the 1930s to find a crisis comparable to the one we are in — it is one of those once-in-a-lifetime experiences.”
Now that’s just nonsense…and highly political.
For a start Orwell wrote ‘The Road To Wigan Pier’ in 1937…so about a period before 1937…and the OBR quote the BBC refers to actually says we could have spending as a ratio of GDP at a level equivalent to that in 1938 and certainly not the depression era of the early 1930’s which the BBC is linking to….
Government consumption of goods and services falls to its lowest share of GDP since at least 1948 – when comparable National Accounts data begins – and since 1938 using a historical dataset compiled by the Bank of England
But note this:
The UK’s National Accounts data have been revised substantially since our March forecast. In addition to the usual annual revisions process, the ONS has implemented the 2010 European System of Accounts (ESA10). The main consequence has been to increase the measured size of the economy. Relative to the data available at the time of our March forecast, nominal GDP in 2013 has been revised up by 6 per cent (around £90 billion)
So we are not comparing like with like….the GDP figure has been inflated by new accounting rules from Europe and so any cut in spending as a ratio of GDP will look worse.
Not only that but in 1998 Labour took us to similar low levels of spending….the OBR says…
As Chart 1.1 illustrates, total public spending is now projected to fall to 35.2 per cent of GDP in 2019-20
Labour’s spending in 1998 was 36%…a 0.8% difference then….hardly a massive difference….was that ‘utterly terrifying’ in 1998?
The BBC has been telling us that the Tories must answer the important, critical, question about how they will find the cuts, or savings, in government spending…apparently ‘critics’ and ‘people’ were asking this question….hmmm…does the BBC mean ‘Labour’ are asking the question and the BBC is doing Labour’s dirty work for them?…..however when it comes to Labour they actually praise Ed Ball’s refusal to answer claiming that he is intent on analysing the situation and will not be rushed into making a judgement…in other words he hasn’t got a plan and certainly doesn’t intend to let the Public know about one if he did have any thoughts on the subject….
The OBR report is more honest about what the parties say…curious the BBC missed this bit:
The recovery now looks stronger, with real GDP regaining its pre-recession peak in the third quarter of 2013, three quarters earlier than in the previous vintage of data.
The Conservatives have said they would look to cut welfare spending by more, so that they could cut public services by less. And the Liberal Democrats have said that they would be willing to borrow more to finance capital spending that would increase growth, and also to increase taxes on the relatively well-off. Labour has said that it would “balance the books and deliver a surplus on the current budget and falling national debt in the next Parliament. How fast we can go will depend on the state of the economy and the public finances we inherit.”
Now the BBC’s Adam Parsons told us that Labour had in fact, if you look closely, announced more plans to make cuts than the Tories….but he failed to lay out exactly what they were….and the OBR clearly doesn’t agree with the BBC on that.
The BBC doesn’t bother with this from the OBR:
On our central forecast, the Coalition Government is on track to meet its fiscal mandate – to borrow only what it needs to pay for investment, adjusting for the state of the economy, at the end of the five-year forecast – with £50.6 billion to spare. This implies an 80 per cent probability of success given the accuracy of past forecasts
The Telegraph does a fine job in critiquing the BBC’s coverage…Danny Cohen will be upset:
Once again, the BBC shows its true colours
Licence fee payers deserve better than the preposterous partisan bias of the BBC
David Cameron attacks BBC over ‘Wigan Pier’ cuts coverage
David Cameron’s spokesman says BBC coverage likening cuts programme to Depression-era Britain was ‘hyperbolic’
Tories at war with ‘biased BBC’
David Cameron and George Osborne furious over Autumn Statement coverage which they claim contained ‘systematic exaggeration’
Is Britain back on the Road to Wigan Pier?
As sparks fly between ministers and the BBC, the former mining town is yet to forgive George Orwell
I have just listened to the Norman Smith comments at the start of the Today prog yesterday at about 6.10am – the “All is Doom” stuff.
He starts of with a howler. The Gov. has reduced spending in non-ringfenced departments such as Transport by one-third so far – and intends to cut by another third. Smith makes the ignorant error of taking this to mean that at the end it will be one-third of what it was at the start.
Idiot.
100% minus one-third as the first tranche leaves 67%.
One-third of 67% is 22%, so spending goes down to 45%.
NOT down to 33% which Smith was suggesting.
He is only the Assistant after all – what more can you expect.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/bbc/11274340/Tories-at-war-with-biased-BBC.html
Woken up at last ? Too late !!
So after 5 years in government with just a few scant days to go to the election, leftie Dave has realised that it simply doesn’t matter how far left he goes, the Fascists will never abandon Labour, it’s not about politics, it’s about perceived class.
“One senior Tory MP suggested there was a risk that unless the BBC was scrupulously fair in its reporting it could drive voters “into the arms of Labour”
Well no shit Sherlock! It’s what this site was set up to expose, what we’ve all known about for years, what the Thatcher government talked about, and what the wholly inept David Cameron thought he could end by his brand of ‘caring Conservatism’.
Even Cameron’s cabinet colleagues are saying he’s hopeless and incapable. What happened to the Thatcher vision of people succeeding by their hard work? Destroyed under the ideology of the BLiar years where inequality rose at a faster rate than ever before, and continued under Camerons ineptitude.
We all knew there would be a problem at the BBC when the new DG was asked what he would do about the bias, and appeared to not even know that there was even a question mark over the corporation.
It’s too late now for the Tories who should have been alive to this right from the get go. As a result they will probably lose the next election, and they certainly deserve to!
Precisely so.
‘right from the get go’.
🙁
Okay then – where is Osbourne’s growth going to come from with government spending at 35% of GDP?
Which of business investment, international trade or private borrowing are going to increase in the meantime?
Atlas,unchained from excessive taxation
(Some might say)
According to the Guardian’s figures here (scroll down), spending as a percentage of GDP fell to 34.5% in 2000/01.
I don’t think these are figures adjusted for ESA10, and so the true comparable figure may be even lower.
Back around 2000/01 businesses were at least occassionally keen to invest and individuals weren’t quite so massively stacked to the gills with debt. Neither of those circumstances hold today.
Taxed or not, UK large business is sitting on at least £53 billion in cash – why aren’t they investing it now?
http://www.scot-buzz.co.uk/business-economy/revealed-%C2%A353-billion-corporate-cash-pile
Neither Osbourne or Balls have the answers to this – they’re two cheeks of the same arse.
Perhaps, but there’s a boil on one of the cheeks.
Personal borrowing rose from £500 million in 1997 to over £1.4 trillion in 2008.
That was under Labour, that was.
Overall, Beeboids show significant economic ignorance and political leftist opportunism on public finance.
For decades, Beeboids have bowdlerised Keynesianism into Labour Party’s erroneous meaning of: ‘more public spending is always good.’
At the same time, Beeboids are now trying to spread their pre-Election political propaganda that the Tories are spending too much, so that the national debt is still high; but Beeboids are also politically condemning the Tories for not spending enough, so that there is still austerity!
Talk about the contradictions of Marxists.
Is this not the lefty scum all over?
Hate the rich but are desperate for the banks to start lending again…hate the rich but are happy to live in million pound mansions at our expense….love immigrants but don’t seem to employ many…want to ‘destroy’ poverty but are happy to charge a £140 pound licence fee to the most hard off…think they are impartial but are so biased that it is beyond embarrassing.
That is the problem with the liberal lefty scum, you can pull them to pieces over their complete transparency but it doesn’t matter…the lies get bigger, the leaders get nastier, the followers become even more brainwashed and the bbc’s accusations become even more outrageous than ever, they are never wrong and will never accept the error of their ways…a little like nazislam really which is why they get on so well. How do you defeat their zealotry?
We can only hope that the voting public have seen through the bullshit like we see in the blog above because if liebour do win the next election I seriously worry as to where this country will end up, the country’s problems are due to the disastrous 13 year liebour tenure and the utterly failed EU experiment, any more of that and it will be catastrophic…now that is utterly terrifying.
While Labour and trade unions, inc BBC-NUJ, favour cuts in Defence spending (even in these times of danger to U.K national security), they campaign to have ‘foreign aid’ ring-fenced.
‘Express’-
“UK foreign aid bill could cost £1BILLION more than expected as Tory rebels plot revolt.
“BRITAIN’S foreign aid bill could cost £1 BILLION more than previously predicted, it has been revealed.”
http://www.express.co.uk/news/politics/543946/Foreign-aid-bill-1billion-more-than-expected-bill
If many people like Millipede, can I at least have some respect for Cameron The fastest growing economy in the world (this one) managing a coalition of pro EU Marxists on the gravy train Putting up with the BBC. This government hasn’t done so bad (I think)
1937/38 spending levels might have had something to do with our re-arming like crazy gettng ready to fight Hitler & the small matter of still having a sizeable part of the globe to rule over.
So what is the excuse today?
In their next interviews Osborne and Cameron should ask their BBC interrogators how high they expect it is reasonable for the national debt to go, given the savagetorycutz have had little impact so far.
Also the BBC might just ask Balls sometime whether he plans to cut the benefits budget should Labour get elected – if so, how and if not, what would he cut instead. Then again, they might not, choosing instead to parrot the Labour mantra of (through their famed ‘But Labour says’ method of propagandising) ‘fair choices’.
Economic growth in the 1930s was abysmal.
1929 + 2.96%
1930 – 0.89%
1931 – 4.97%
1932 + 0.44%
1933 +3.29%
1934 +6.21%
1935 +3.68%
1936 +4.92%
1937 +3.47%
1938 +0.66%
1939 +4.64%
Everyone talks about the 1931 figure but as you can see for most of the decade there was strong growth in the economy. America of course was badly hit because of the knock-on effect of the wall-street crash. It is mainly America that we remember.
Send that info to `But Labour Says` Norman Fucking Smith .What a Labourite tosser .Think I got him muddled up with the late Jeremy Thorpes lover, Norman Scott ,or did I ?
All we ever get on the BBC for the thirties are soup kitchen shots and the Jarrow March.
Britain’s fiscal and economic problems result from grotesque mishandling of the economy under the 1997-2010 Labour administration. Gordon Brown’s reform of the financial
regulatory system, and his insistence that the Bank of England determine monetary policy on the basis of retail inflation alone, resulted in a reckless escalation in mortgage lending. The ensuing property price boom spurred unsustainable growth in a plethora of housing-related sectors, and underwrote a rapid expansion in consumer borrowing. Believing that this bubble was real growth,
Brown spent up to, and beyond, the apparent expansion in the tax base that had resulted from the property driven boom. Real public spending increased by 53% in a period in which the economy expanded by just 17%. As soon as the bubble burst, a chasm
rapidly opened up between excessive spending and falling tax revenues. In addition to skewing the economy towards debt and public spending, Brown and his colleagues imposed ever-increasing regulatory and fiscal burdens on business, and simultaneously transferred resources from private industry into a public sector whose productivity was subject to continuous decline. This weakened the overall productivity of the British economy. Labour’s period in office was characterised not just by economic and fiscal mismanagement but also by the promotion of a culture of moral
absolutism centred around spurious and selective concepts of ‘fairness’. This culture, and the accompanying sense of individual and collective entitlement, is the biggest obstacle in the way of effective economic reform. Tullet Prebon..Thinking the Unthinkable
“BBC lies and the truth about poverty now and in the 30s by DOMINIC SANDBROOK”
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2862976/BBC-lies-truth-poverty-30s-DOMINIC-SANDBROOK.html#ixzz3L6yL1ngM
A good piece by Dominic Sandbrook in the Mail today, refuting the 30s comparison.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2862976/BBC-lies-truth-poverty-30s-DOMINIC-SANDBROOK.html
DS must feels his position is strong enough that he dares criticise the Beeb, maybe he’s been offered a series on C4.
Good article written with a well-informed historical perspective the BBC lacks in most of its output.
But then we knew that already.
Certainly in the ’30s the BBC would not have seen its role to be part of the Opposition to the Government of the day.
Of course we are not on the road to Wigan Pier.
That is an absolutely wrong and preposterous national broadcaster analysis! The BBC really do not represent the UK in an honest, realistic way?
One would think our state broadcaster could easily explain the severe financial predictions in the Autumn statement, since they have an army of some of the highest paid economic analysis experts on their staff in the land, courtesy of our taxes.
They just need to see through the red mist which unfortunately has infected most of the BBC political reporting through their choice ‘left’ ethos, with recruitment policies to match, for decades now.
I am just a mere ex-soldier and small businessman and it is all pretty clear to me.
Basically, in 2010 the Coalition was bequeathed the worst peacetime economic legacy ever, at any General Election since WW2. No government of any colour would be able to pay off that deficit and debt under around a decade, such is the gigantic scale of the Blair, Brown and Co legacy! Such an attempt would indeed give us a ‘Greek Tragedy’.
Our Country, a premier world banking centre, contributed greatly to the infection of many other nations banking systems too!
It is of course accepted it was manly initiated in the USA by sub-prime and other lax banking practices, but our Treasury Ministers failed spectacularly in their dereliction of duty to regulate properly the City of London.
They let these London based banks run riot, at great cost to the rest of us and also to the other Nations banks who obviously were encouraged to follow the ‘world class’ London example we set and that is now clear!
One should not forget it was Brown Balls & Milliband, more than any other MPs who were in the treasury and are most to to blame for not regulating and the recession legacy they left. Just wish the BBC would get that obvious fact over to the British public as part of their inform the nation without fear or favour remit!
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6240362.stm
The country was basically on the brink of bankruptcy after 13 years of Labour. They certainly ‘did not fix the roof whilst the sun was shining’ borrowing to the hilt even during those financial good times when they should have been building the reserves, (not selling off 400 tons of gold at bargain basement prices) and leaving notes to their successors that there was ‘nothing left’.
Even, now Labour have the brass neck to ‘slag off’ the other parties for wanting to privatise the NHS!
They really think us ‘plebs’ did not notice PFI, for example, which is going to require our children and grandchildren to pay off £300 bn for the NHS over the next generation. This is causing great hardship in the NHS already!
http://www.channel4.com/news/counting-the-cost-of-pfi-in-the-nhs
Just hope the Tories now follow through with the Broadcaster Licence review and right an obvious wrong.
If I thought the Conservatives were going to abolish the BBC in the next parliament I would probably vote for them. There are other major issues too but this is somehow the most pressing as it affects the other ones.
Just hope the Tories now follow through with the Broadcaster Licence review and right an obvious wrong.
If the tories don’t do it now they never will, the constant and completely one sided reporting by the scum at the bbc should be enough for the review to be pushed through with a recommendation to abolish the tax.
There is of course another side to these figures.
Cuts have been made, but it’s where and how they have been made, because spending in some area has increased – massively.
Back home in Briton leftie Dave has carried on the left wing hate campaign against the white lumpen proletariat who haven’t the sense to realise what is being done to them by political parties, especially one which used to claim it was formed to support them.
So while Cameron is splashing the cash without a care in the world to Muslim countries he is mercilessly cutting the benefits of the white working class, and forcing them into starvation. Taking their means of earning a living by allowing mass immigration and mass migration, and then blaming them for not having a job.
All part of the plan to make them suffer even more for their crime of being white.
I am not one for approaching the great and the good/celebs whilst they go about their lives etc, and I have never done so before, but when I saw Nick Robinson and helper in the street today I simply could not walk on past. So I politely stopped him and informed him that it will not be the Tories/Telegraph that kills the bbc, it will be his bias and that of other at the BBC, cue him +1 walking off in huff etc etc. Couldn’t help but also point out his miss quoting of Liam Byrne the other day…i.e. Bryne never said ‘sorry there is no money’, only ‘I’m afraid there is no money’, probably a subtly lost on the bbc.