Fascinating watching the BBC at work as 4 of its finest tried to get to grips with the budget, sifting desperately through it in a frantic search for the big ‘un, the scoop that would blow Osborne away.
The best that they could come up with was that he had failed to meet his target of reducing debt as a proportion of GDP….Huw Edwards said sagely that this was ‘significant’. [at 3 hrs 16] unfortunately Paul Johnson from the IFS was in the studio and pulled the rug from under Edwards by saying it was ‘economically not signifcant at all’…Edwards looked chastened and rolled his eyes but recovered with a ‘I meant politically significant of course’...and all his workmates chimed in with a similar line to help him out of his embarrasment, and funnily enough the BBC’s Kamal Ahmed made no mention of its ‘insignificance’ in this report.
Odd that the BBC should now think this figure significant because last year they were dismissing this way of measuring debt out of hand telling us it was an Osborne trick to cover up a failure to lower the deficit.
Huw Edwards wound back the clock as he interviewed Matt Hancock and stated that it was wrong to continue with austerity when the world economy was so weak when instead the government should be stimulating the economy. Heard that before from the BBC…in fact we heard it everyday for 5 years…it was called Plan B…and it was Labour’s policy.
He also thought it ‘illuminating’ that much of the surplus would come from cutting government spending and not massive growth….hmmm…this from the BBC that was warning us of massive cuts to come in this second Parliament for Cameron, cuts so bad they would take us back to the Thirties and the road to Wigan Pier…..the cuts were going to be ‘utterly terrifying‘….never mind that they would actually take us back to the level of government spending in 1998 under Labour….not the terrifying Thirties then?
To achieve the Office for Budget Responsibility’s forecast of a budget surplus of £23bn by 2019-20 would require “spending cuts on a colossal scale ..
If reductions in departmental spending were to continue at the same pace after the May 2015 election as they had over the past four years, welfare cuts or tax rises worth about £21bn a year would be needed by 2019-20, at a time when the Conservatives were committed to income tax cuts worth £7bn, according to the IFS.
We have always known that the surplus would come from cutting spending…it is not a surprise nor ‘illuminating’ to rediscover this today….the BBC wants us to think that Osborne’s plans are in chaos and that he is flailing around using ‘magic’ as Edwards suggested…..oddly the Guardian also uses that line….Budget 2016: magical thinking from charmed world of the chancellor.
As for the sugar tax….the jury is definitely out on that one, effectiveness wise, despite the BBC’s assertion that Mexico provided proof positive that a sugar tax works……however the studies done were funded by the people who lobbied the Mexican government to impose the sugar tax….and the New Zealand government has looked at this and concluded there is as yet no proof to suggest the tax works.
The Science Media Centre also casts doubt on the findings.
Even the Guardian admits….The evidence that a soda tax can reduce obesity and disease, however, comes largely from theoretical models.
The BBC though were delighted for Jamie Oliver…..as I am.
Guido is not so sure about the hypocritical little chap….
Jamie Oliver is all over the BBC celebrating his punitive sugar tax – but this is sweet hypocrisy. On his website, Jamie offers a series of recipes aimed at children. A bowl of granola for a child’s breakfast, advertised as “a healthy and delicious start to the day”, contains an unbelievable 20.9g of sugar. That’s 23% of an adult’s daily recommended intake, and this is supposed to be for a child.
Experts recommend 4-8 year olds should have 12g of sugar per day, teenagers should have 20-32 grams. A single serving of this Jamie recipe surpasses the maximum recommended teenager’s sugar allowance, and three times that of 8 year olds…
Oh and there’s this from Guido’s site…..gotta love it…..
Unfortunately for me as soon as I hear the name Huw Edwards I think of his face the day after the 2015 General Election, he looked like he was chewing wasps as he announced the Tory win. I try to stop myself laughing as I’m sure one day he’ll announce something serious but I fail every time.
I prefer the phrase, ‘a face like a bulldog licking piss off a thistle.’
And for someone like Edwards the phrase doesn’t merely apply after a Tory election victory..!
It was priceless, wasn’t it! They were all lost for words in the studio; never to be forgotten!
Does the bBC run the control room that broadcasts the Parliament channel? I ask because when Corbyn gave his reply, the cameras did not show the reaction of the PLP. What glimses that were possible, they were quiet, looking at their phones, knitting, etc. One thing they were not interested in was Corbyn. It was just as if the camera selection was such as to minimise us seeing this.
‘Knitting’?
Place de la Concorde comes to mind.
George Osborne is floundering about but not for the reasons highlighted by the BBC. Economic forecasting is a highly imprecise ‘black art’ full of assumptions and prejudices injected by the forecaster. To tie his actions on tax and spending every few months to constantly shifting OBR forecasts about GDP, government borrowing etc is simply pointless for the Chancellor. Added to this is the sheer statistical unreliability of the numbers. Is GDP being under-measured? (Probably). How fast is the immigrant, hence UK, labour force growing ?(Probably much faster then survey data on immigrant arrivals/departures suggests). So how reliable are the UK labour productivity statistics? (Difficult to be sure but productivity world-wide is a problem and the main reason why we can’t all expect to get automatically better off as we could in the post-WW2 golden era of 1950-73.).
Good job the BBC TV pundits didn’t really know how to put Osborne on the spot!
Then we get to the fact that Osborne’s tax tinkering is not only unnecessary but actually damaging for business, apart from the relief given to SMEs. And is hounding individual buy to let landlords a substitute for building more houses? No!
That’s the thing. Gideon makes an ADD five year old on a coke binge look like a model of long-term planning. There are approximately 1 bazillion sensible arguments that could be made against him, but instead the alleged Smart People at the BBC just keep squawking Labour talking points. There’s no analysis there at all, just an obsession with stupid gotchas and point scoring. You could pick ten names off the electoral roll and at least two of them would be able to come up with a better analysis than the BBC managed.
I wonder how many readers heard the Nigel Farrage interview on the budget? It did make a lot of sense and the whole budget is predicated on the UK staying in the EU and importing millions more migrants to prop up GDP making the radio of debt to GDP work in Osbornes favour.
If the UK votes to leave the EU though, the whole house of cards comes falling down and it will of course be blamed as a result of leaving the EU, when in reality it is the complete failure of George Osborne to write a budget which envisages a UK standing alone without resorting to mass migration – something the Tories lied about cutting back on.
The BBC could of course have pointed all of this out, but if they had it would have gone right against the staunch beliefs of remaining in the EU, and mass migration !
No chance of that then !
Today we had the likes of Webb fussing over Osbornes catastrophic budget.
But with added gall in that they sounded disappointed in him, after all those years of unstinting support that the BBC have always shown in George.
As if-within 24 hours of every damn budget-the BBC haven`t been ringing round the charities, the disabled, the nanny, Surestart creche, their ex uni spouts-to knit the annual misery index of nasty George and his attacks on Peter Whites wallahs, Winfred Robinsons grumbling appendices.
As if the BBC haven`t dined out on his 2012 Omnishambles with pasties and petrol.
Thankfully all Labours old pigthickies are all called Jeremy, Jasper or Torsten-so are all easily brought to mind in their new guises in charge of “independent think tanks”-and giving us the same old socialist slime.
And all a good punt stick away from the thirteen years when they crashed and tanked the economy-but with no admission that they`re thick lazy privileged scum, and in no place to judge even THIS dolt of a Chancellor.
STFUBBC.
chrisH, LOL ! Agree that Osborne is a dolt. But who is “Torsten” ? Some kind of Scandinavian typo ?
Torsten Bell? Ex-Labour SPAD?