#Brexit budget threats mean Osborne has admitted the harm caused by austerity

Last Updated: June 16, 2016By
Osborne and Alistair Darling say 'Leave' campaign claims that Britain would have more to spend on public services if it leaves the EU are a con [Image: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images].

Osborne and Alistair Darling say ‘Leave’ campaign claims that Britain would have more to spend on public services if it leaves the EU are a con [Image: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images].

We all knew Osborne’s austerity – cutting the amount of money going into the economy in order to pay off national debts – was a crock, right?

Now it seems our phoney Chancellor is admitting it too, by saying the only way to deal with a ‘Brexit’ budget shock is to move to a ‘tax and spend’ policy.

Osborne has always criticised New Labour for ‘tax and spend’, even though it is debatable whether that claim is true; now he is abandoning his own beliefs and advocating it himself.

Doesn’t this prove that his policy for the last six years has been simply to sell everything we own to the rich and punish the poor?

The UK’s electorate should never have allowed this man anywhere near our public finances.

Now we are on the horns of an unenviable dilemma:

Whose lies do we choose? Osborne’s, or those of Farage, Boris Johnson, Gove, Iain Duncan Smith and the rest of the Brexit rabble?

For the last six years, George Osborne has been insisting that in order to tackle the UK’s current account deficit (the annual difference between what the country earns, and what it spends) and reduce the national debt, there was only one option: to cut public sector spending via austerity. And of course, most of those austerity cuts were enacted on the poor, many of which came out of the benefits system. Meanwhile, the richest and the oldest members of society got off pretty much scot-free – because Osborne claimed there was no use in raising the top rate of tax, since rich people would find a way of avoiding paying for it anyway.

Fast forward to George Osborne’s Brexit budget warning about an ‘emergency Budget’ this week, and the Chancellor, who shared a platform with his predecessor Alistair Darling, seems to have quickly changed his tune.

Osborne is quoted as saying that if faced with a situation where Britain votes to Leave the EU, he would be left with ‘no choice’ but to raise £30bn via emergency taxes and cuts, stating: “No Conservative Chancellor wants to raise taxes, least of all me, but you cannot have chaos in public finances, and you have to deal with the hole that would emerge if we quit the EU.” He went on to make threats about increasing inheritance tax.

So George Osborne is publicly acknowledging that austerity cuts to public spending do not work, whereas raising taxes does, and is now actively preparing the ground for tax hikes and a return to the same “tax and spend” policies for which he has constantly attacked the Labour party.

Osborne can’t have his cake and sell it too: either he admits that austerity really has been ideological and unfair on the poor, or he abandons his “emergency Budget” threats and admits that taxes under a Tory government wouldn’t go up for the richest in the event of a Brexit.

Source: Osborne has accidentally exposed how ridiculous his austerity cuts were through his post-Brexit Budget threats | Voices | The Independent

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One Comment

  1. mrmarcpc June 16, 2016 at 1:00 pm - Reply

    Austerity hasn’t worked, done more harm then good, Osborne is a clown who should be out of office!

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