John Glen, Tory Chief Secretary to the Treasury, got badly mauled when he tried to dissemble about the Budget in an interview with Victoria Derbyshire on the BBC’s Newsnight.
He couldn’t explain why it was a “Budget for growth” when medium-term growth forecasts have been downgraded.
And on the effects of Brexit, challenged to admit that it has made the UK poorer, he could not provide an alternative explanation for what has happened since the country left the European Union.
He crumbled under scrutiny.
Watch this car crash interview and understand why Tory leadership has taken the UK nowhere.
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While the people of the UK point out that raw sewage is being pumped into our waterways, the UK has the poorest economy of all G7 countries, Brexit is a disaster, supermarket shelves are empty, people can’t pay their energy bills, the NHS is in crisis and everyone is on strike…
… all Rishi Sunak and his gang can say is, “Stop the boats.”
Pathetic. Miserable. Unacceptable.
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This is new from Gary Stevenson – and it’s right on the button.
He says Chancellor Jeremy Hunt is blaming the fact that the UK economy is in a terrible state and poor people keep getting poorer on “black swan” events – disasters that should be extremely rare (like black swans). That we’ve been unlucky, basically.
But extremely rich people like him keep getting richer, don’t they?
So is it really bad luck? Or is it a plan?
Here’s Gary:
It’s an excuse.
Hunt, those who came before him, and his entire political movement, have created a system in which the rich get richer and the poor get poorer – but is using news stories as scapegoats.
It is our duty to challenge him on his nonsense every time he spouts it.
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Economy with the truth: I know Boris Johnson hasn’t been prime minister for a while but the words are just as appropriate for Rishi Sunak and his Chancellor, Jeremy Hunt.
The Conservatives have tweeted a nonsense claim that the UK economy has recorded the fastest growth out of all G7 countries – probably in an attempt to whitewash their economic failures ahead of next month’s budget statement.
It’s entirely possible that the four per cent growth claimed by the Tory government was the highest of 2022 – but the UK was coming from behind everybody else due to the Tory government’s Covid pandemic cock-ups (and Brexit), and remains behind everybody else overall.
And matters are due to get worse, with no growth at all projected for 2023.
Watch Peter Stefanovic’s video clip, below, for the facts about the UK economy.
The Conservatives have triumphantly tweeted
“The UK economy recorded the fastest growth in the G7”
He’s promising to repeat these facts every day if he has to, and I hope he does.
It might be the only way to make sure the truth gets to everybody, when the mainstream media are full of Tory half-truths and lies.
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Rishi Sunak: the economy is beyond the understanding of this former Chancellor of the Exchequer, who is now the UK’s prime minister.
This Writer is guilty of terrible omissions in my political viewing habits; I keep forgetting Robert Peston’s interview show.
This week, he was talking to Howard Davies, chairman of NatWest, along with Labour’s John McDonnell and Ruth Davidson of the Conservatives, and it was Mr Davies who proved most interesting.
He laid into former PM Liz Truss, who has claimed she was brought down by a mythical “left-wing establishment”:
“I thought it was pretty bizarre… it was a strange combination of people that she was targeting”
His words were supported by Mr McDonnell, who explained how he had planned for a future Labour government in 2017 and 2019 by liaising with the relevant economic movers and shakers in order to be sure that everybody knew what he was planning. He considered Truss’s failure to prepare as “incompetent”:
"You might not like quite a lot of this, but it's going to happen, so get ready for it"@johnmcdonnellMP describes how he engaged with officials from the Treasury and the Bank of England before the 2017 & 2019 General Elections, unlike Liz Truss before her mini-budget.#Pestonpic.twitter.com/84GYma2ub3
Mr Davies also described the economic levers that he believed were tipping the UK into recession – including Brexit, despite Tory claims to the contrary:
“It’s fruitless to say that Brexit isn’t in there, it is”
Chairman of NatWest @HowardJDavies explains that Brexit is undeniably in the mix of factors including, coronavirus and the energy crisis, that have negatively impacted the UK’s economic growth.#Pestonpic.twitter.com/qmHOjJdS0E
And he said although the recession was likely to be shallow, it would be hard to bring it to an end because the government has no plans to do so:
“It may be quite like a long, shallow recession. It may be a bit like Southport beach where you can walk out a long, long way before you can actually swim”
This is unsurprising. If a government refuses to accept the reasons for recession (like Brexit), then it is unlikely to be able to plan a successful way out.
But that leaves the question: if Howard Davies can recognise the problems, why can’t Rishi Sunak?
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Spaffer: Boris Johnson splurged hundreds of billions of pounds during the Covid crisis and his successors have continued the trend. It all went to people who were already rich and has caused huge hardship to the poor, and nobody in government wants to re-balance the situation. Why?
It’s time to follow up on Gary Stevenson, the former City trader who became an economist and anti-inequality campaigner.
Last time, I shared Gary’s contributions to the BBC’s Politics Live via a YouTube clip that became extremely popular, with more than 140,000 views as I type this. Rest assured, there will be more content on YouTube in the future!
Now, Gary himself has shared what he himself took from his experience on the show, with which I’d like to couple his more recent clip, What is money? Together, I think they may explain why it’s so important that we find out who has the £700 billion that Boris Johnson’s government has splurged, and find a way to get them to spend it back into the economy or tax it off of them.
Here’s the first clip:
So: an enormous amount of money has been transferred from the government to the richest people in the UK, leading to a huge increase in government debt which triggers austerity, and a big increase in cash accumulation by the richest, leading to inflation and a cost-of-living crisis. The reasons for that are below.
Nobody in government seems to know where the money has gone – £14,000 for every adult in the UK. I don’t have 14 grand. Do you? Who’s got it, then? And what are they doing with it? They don’t want to say it has gone to the richest people in the country.
And they definitely don’t want to admit that their decision to hand over that money has forced you into extreme poverty!
That money could be put to good use, if the people who have it spend it back into the economy, one way or another. What did we get for it? Was it worth the cost? If not, something needs to be done.
Here’s the other clip:
Money is created by central banks and loaned out to others – so for every penny anybody has, there is a penny of debt somewhere; the total amount of money, minus the total amount of debt, always equals zero.
So if one group of people – like a government – goes heavily into debt, somebody else must be accumulating money or credit.
(The government then has to pay interest on the debt, and in a closed system, that means taxing more out of the economy than it put in; this is a way of regulating the money supply, of course. Commercial banks that borrow from the central bank would charge higher interest than it does when they make loans, in order to make their profit – meaning they rely on the system putting you into debt.)
We know that the government spent – splurged – £700 billion during and after Covid – £14,000 per UK adult. But every UK adult hasn’t had £14,000 from the government; somebody else had it.
People who are in debt – including governments – need to get money back from people who are in credit, otherwise they can’t balance their books. Until they can manage such a feat, that debt creates austerity – it harms public sector pay and public services don’t get the investment they need.
The problem is that only a small number of people are in credit, while the government – representing all of us – and a lot of others are in debt. There’s an imbalance between the large number of people owing money and the small number who have it, and (by the way) can lend it, and can therefore demand interest from the people to whom they lend it, in the same way a bank can.
So now, not only do we have a huge amount of government debt to pay off, but we may have private debt as well, because the cost of living has risen.
And why has the cost of living risen?
As Gary said, there has been a massive increase in asset prices: both gold and shares have hit (by now, I think) an all-time high, and that’s because rich people have been buying them up, with a view to profiting on them – because they have so much money, it won’t hurt them to invest much of it.
This creates scarcity, and that pushes up prices, meaning that ordinary people cannot afford to buy as much as they could before. The amount of resources available within the economy is the same, more or less, but fewer people can take advantage of it because the redistribution of money means they can’t afford it.
We have seen a resource run low – gas – and that has simply piled extra pressure on the poor.
We have a government that is not interested in resolving its £700 billion debt. Instead, it is planning to spend even more. So prices will continue to rise and living standards – for the majority – will continue to fall.
And that is why the current Conservative government has presided over the largest increase in inequality in UK history.
It occurs to This Writer that pushing huge debt onto the vast majority of the population may have been government policy all along.
Expect (probably) a video clip in the near future, explaining why.
Have YOU donated to my crowdfunding appeal, raising funds to fight false libel claims by TV celebrities who should know better? These court cases cost a lot of money so every penny will help ensure that wealth doesn’t beat justice.
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High energy costs have forced 6.7 million homes into fuel poverty – expected to rise to 8.4 million homes in April.
It means increasing numbers of households are checking their smart meters before doing anything that might cost money.
Campaigners are calling for the government to introduce a special “social energy tariff” to make it easier to afford heating:
And there has been a knock-on effect: shop sales over the Christmas period are down – by around 50 per cent in some cases:
It’s only to be expected.
If you starve working people of cash, as the government has by cutting real-terms wages, and then charge them a fortune for the basic necessities of life, then they won’t have any spare readies for non-essential items.
Shops are going to go out of business, worsening the current recession, and overbalancing the economy into collapse.
But the Tory government doesn’t seem to care.
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Gary Stevenson is a former City trader who became a campaigner against economic inequality after making a fortune betting on the economy worsening as a result of government policies.
He appeared on the BBC’s Politics live and spoke more sense than the rest of the panel combined, on subjects including wealth taxes for the rich and new ‘Levelling Up’ funding.
Here’s what he had to say. Judge for yourself.
I’ll see if I can find more from him.
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Keir Starmer’s first major speech of the year promised a decade of “national renewal” – but he said Labour would not spend money to achieve this.
How is it going to happen then?
Challenged on it, he said he’d get rid of non-dom tax exemptions and stop private schools having charity status as well. That raises around £4.5 billion – which is a tiny fraction of the £180 billion NHS budget alone.
So what’s the point of a Labour government that won’t spend more than the Tories to build an economy that can actually grow?
All he could offer was waffle. But then, who believes anything he says, anyway? He used to oppose HS2 but now he wants to take it further than the Tories were planning.
See the following for his babblings, plus analysis:
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The Bank of England has put interest rates up again – claiming that this is an attempt to fight inflation.
But inflation caused domestically – within the UK – is much lower than the 10.7 per cent rate that has been announced during the week, and falling (from 6.5 per cent to 6.3 per cent).
The higher rate is caused by price increases that cannot be changed by interest rate rises within the UK; we simply have to wait for these prices to drop. They are the result of political decisions to put the UK at the mercy of foreign businesses and influences.
Let’s have an example of mainstream media reporting on this:
And now the view from one of our favourite political economists:
So, it’s confirmed. The Bank of England is intent on trashing the economy, small businesses, households and the life chances of millions and nothing they’re doing will make any difference to the rate of inflation we are suffering. Callousness on this scale is hard to make up https://t.co/Ncf6ckFBVt
Yes, that’s right. The inflation we’re suffering will be unaffected by UK interest rate rises.
All this decision will do is create further hardship for homeowners and small businesses, and prolong the recession that stupid Tory political decisions have caused.
Have YOU donated to my crowdfunding appeal, raising funds to fight false libel claims by TV celebrities who should know better? These court cases cost a lot of money so every penny will help ensure that wealth doesn’t beat justice.
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