Remember the BBC’s hyperbolic, apocalypic doom-mongering about ‘austerity’?…
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.
“The scale of cuts details in non-protected departments will face cuts of roughly another third. You have to question whether that is achievable. We are told that 60 per cent of the cuts are still to come. We are facing an extraordinary, cavernous financial hole, which to some extent yesterday’s razzmatazz around a politically popular budget rather glossed over.
Curiously no such wild ravings about the Corbyn manifesto, no cries of ‘utterly terrifying’, no dark messages about returning to the bad old days of the grim and miserable 1970’s with the dead unburied and mountains of uncollected rubbish in the streets swarming with rats and the unions running riot.
The BBC has a very short memory when it suits and is quite capable of looking away and bluffing it when it comes to examining the economy under the Tories.
Since 2010 the BBC has bombarded the government with shocked analyses of its austerity plans and their effects…the BBC has blitzed the Public with the message that austerity is appalling and, on the other hand, debt under the Tories is massive and growing prodigiously fast. This is a contradictory message Labour likes to push as well.
Indeed it is the current message…various Corbynistas came onto Campbell’s show today to tell us of the evils of austerity and the crippling debt that the Tories have burdened the country with. Campbell said absolutely nothing and let them get away with making those contrary claims….and making no mention of the fact that Corbyn wants to add massively to that debt that the Corbynistas complain so loudly about.
You may have noticed a paradox though…on the one hand they complain of austerity, on the other they complain of the mounting debt. What’s missing is firstly the truth, secondly some basic intelligence and understanding.
Why is the national debt rising? Because we still have a deficit. Why do we have a deficit? Because the government spends more [on all those services and infrastructure so beloved of the Corbynistas] than it raises….and that’s despite attempts to bring down the deficit, attempts of which the same Corbynistas complain bitterly before complaining about the mountain of debt.
But wait…let’s have some context, some history.
Why do we have that massive debt and that deficit anyway? It must be the Tories’ fault coz it’s growing under their reign. Right? Wrong.
That debt is Labour’s debt, the deficit is Labour’s deficit. Until the deficit is zero the debt will keep rising…to get the deficit down and the debt down you have to make cuts, or improve the economy massively….neither one of which Corbyn is capable of.
Way back in 2009 the accountants PWC predicted that the debt in 2015 would be around £1.4 trillion…and they were pretty much spot on. 2009? That’s when Labour were in power…so it confirms that it is Labour policies that put us in the position we are in now….the BBC at the time even confirmed it…naturally it was John Ware, along with Andrew Neil, one of the few real journalists at the BBC prepared to tell the inconvenient truth…
A recent IPSOS/MORI poll found that 50% of people still do not accept that there is a need to cut spending to pay off the national debt, now rising at a giddy £5,656 per second, and set to go on rising until 2014 when it will settle at just under £1.4 trillion.
And who is to blame for austerity?….from the same 2009 programme…
An even higher percentage of the electorate are probably unaware that based on current government forecasts, Britain’s is facing not one but “two parliaments of intensifying pain”, as the Institute of Fiscal Studies (IFS) predicted.
The IFS said that for each of the next eight years, a new round of cuts will have to be found to fill the black hole in the nation’s finances – a hole the Treasury estimates amounts to a £90bn shortfall between tax revenues and government spending.
So in 2009 the IFS were predicting that to get our finances in order we would face two parliaments, 10 years, of cuts….that is Labour’s fault.
The debt we have now is Labour’s fault. The austerity we have now is Labour’s fault.
Shame that BBC presenters, and even their so-called expert finance and economics journalists, are today still expressing shocked outrage at the level of debt the ‘Tories’ have burdened us with….and oh yes…those utterly terrifying spending cuts that take us back to the 1930’s as a proportion of GDP? Why did Norman Smith not just take us back to around 2000/2001 when Labour were in power and the level of spending was almost exactly the same as the 1930’s…and we were in the black…and the country wasn’t reduced to poverty and ruin or indeed put on the road to Wigan Pier? That came soon after as Labour went on a massive spending spree and let the Banks run riot. A golden age of finance indeed.
Austerity is a complete misnomer, there has been none.
I would like to see some austerity to the foreign aid budget!
ED
In tandem with our foreign aid budget which is due to go up ( bet the BBC don’t mention that heartless bit of toryism! ), we have the LibDems wanting to take in ten thousand Syrian refugees ( moneygrubbers ) each year for the term of this parliament at a cost of some 4.1 billion (no the ‘b’ shouldn’t be an ‘m’).
On LBC yesterday no one came on Ferrari’s show ( the only one I listen to ) to support them, further the LibDems so far have refused to say where the money will come from. One LibDem upon not being to say how they would be paid for stated, and I quote, ‘ some things are about principle’ ( ie not about money ).
What with this and Labours absolutely hilariously and dangerous ( sorry that’s an oxymoron, but then so is Labour ) manifesto expect the tories to win with an increased majority.
The debt legacy is indeed from the Labour period in office, but the Conservatives have done precious little to reduce the deficit.
Any decent accountant could have done so in five years, but Osborne was not brave enough to do so. As a result, we have a massive debt mountain.
BBC knows doom. And knows when to sell it. And when not. Often using editorial techniques perfected over decades. And from other countries.
I had a very brief discussion with a union rep (spit!) recently as he was claiming the Tories have historically run higher national debts than Labour. He shut up when I pointed out that he should look at historical deficit levels to get a more accurate picture of past government spending.
Even Cameron didn’t quite grasp the difference between debt and deficit.
Austerity is just one of many substitute words the left likes to use to engineer negative connotations towards things that are objectively reasonable. Their latest one is populism being portrayed as a derogatory term, when it essentially means representing the people and their democratic power. Funny how the left loved the 99% during the Occupy movement yet now see them as an enemy.
In this case, austerity has been turned into a pejorative, when really all it means is being financially responsible. The left can’t admit that because to do so would be to reveal how reckless they are with the economy.
Well said ALM!
It really is a f**ked up world we live in, and it’s the leftists who are causing it. Fake news has been around for decades (so what’s suddenly changed?), the word ‘democracy’ has been bandied about by the left to such an abusive level for years that its importance has been undermined, and the austerity we were ‘threatened’ with never materialised.
The left have been exposed for what most of us always knew they were; hypocrites! Using the word democracy as a trump card in speeches and political propaganda endlessly, using the NHS as a trump card when it comes to attacking anyone who dares question public spending, and complaining about austerity when there is no such thing.
This whole historic period we are currently living through exposes the truth about those on the left: They seek the power to dominate politics, and that requires the removal of democracy.
Borrowing money on behalf of taxpayers and then giving it to overseas projects to make politicians feel good is insane.
Cameron / Osborne could have started to fix the roof when the sun is shining ( don’t hear that now) but chose to bottle it and kept feeding welfare .
Instead borrowing keeps going and taxpayers pay the interest.