Tag Archives: economy

More nonsense from Hunt: we’re not better-off than foreign countries

Jeremy Hunt and Rishi Sunak: the prime minister seems to be telling his Chancellor, “Good one about us compared with Germany, Italy and France. Tell them another!”

Jeremy Hunt padded his Budget statement with a lot of feel-good nonsense that would be better-placed in a work of fiction than in an official government statement.

One of these was that the UK economy has grown faster since 2010 than those of Germany, France and Italy.

This might be claimed at a national level – but it falls down when one examines the economic benefits per person.

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According to BBC Political Editor Chris Mason,

Labour folk get in touch to say it is rather different if you look at GDP per capita – the size of the economy per person; how well off, on average, we each feel.

Labour say on that measure the UK has lower stats than Germany, France and Italy.

So – as far as you are concerned – he was lying, because you are not better-off than people from those other countries, in relation to your living standards in 2010.


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Spring Budget: Tory – and Labour – economics are nonsense

Jeremy Hunt: he’s trying to gaslight us into thinking we need to save money. We don’t.

The Conservatives want to cut the civil service again, for no very good reason. But the important part of Jeremy Hunt’s comment on the subject is that he thinks we can have better public services without spending money on them.

Liam Thorp is absolutely right:

Cutting funding for public services has not improved them. In fact, they are considerably inferior – across the board – to their efficiency in 2010.

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And it seems clear that taking the money away from this useful purpose hasn’t stopped the Tories from spending money like it was going out of fashion:

Only £100 billion? Gary Stevenson reckons it’s eight times as much.

And with the Budget coming up, Hunt also made another outrageous claim that should be blown away as soon as possible:

In fact, as the article states:

in the last four years, five different Tory chancellors have pledged to bring taxes down – only for them to rise to a historic level.

In fact, the current tax burden in the UK is the highest since World War 2.

The problem is that the Tories are trying to gaslight us into thinking that national finances are like household budgets – and they aren’t.

Sadly, this thinking appears to have become contagious as Labour’s Shadow Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, is coming out with the same nonsense:

Oh, and the media are keen to echo the lie, too – but some of us are debunking it:

Bear this in mind:

The simple fact is that money never runs short in an economy like that of the UK, where the government can create as much as it needs.

Money is simply a tool – the lubricant that allows the economy to work by making it easy for us to buy and sell the goods and services that we need.

Government creates money to fund projects that it believes the country needs – or at least, it should. In recent years, the Tories have simply given hundreds of billions of pounds to their rich friends for no good reason at all.

As a result, those rich people have bought up the nation’s assets, making everything more expensive for the rest of us – those least able to afford them. The majority of the people of the UK have been priced out of their own market.

So we now live in a country where everything is phenomenally expensive, and we’re being taxed more than in living memory for services that are rubbish.

And neither the Tories nor Labour intend to do anything about it.

You would have to be insane to give your vote to either of them.


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There is more money in the UK economy than ever before. Who’s got it?

Money, money, money: Rishi Sunak says there’s hardly any available for public services but there is more of it in the UK economy than ever before – more than three times as much as when the Tories came into office in 2010. Why doesn’t he use some of that, rather than leaving it in the hands of people who didn’t deserve to be given it in the first place?

Who is hoarding all the cash?

There is currently around £2.7 trillion washing around the UK economy somewhere. It’s not debt, as your mainstream Establishment politicians keep telling you, because the system needs to have money in order to work. It’s the blood that keeps the body alive; the oil that keeps the engine working. This Writer demonstrated as much in a previous article.

In a population of 68 million people, £2.7 trillion comes out as around £40,000 per person – easily enough for us to be able to pay for top-level public services and have enough left over to treat ourselves.

But we are constantly being told – most recently by Keir Starmer – that there is not enough money to provide the public services that we need; to re-nationalise our national utilities that are mostly making profit for firms owned by foreign governments, to restore our rotting water and sewage network that greedy private shareholders have allowed to fall into ruin while they took our bill payments for themselves, to invest in environmentally-friendly power and technology, to provide cheap housing… the list goes on and on.

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So where is all the cash? It must have gone somewhere, right?

The answer is that it has been given to extremely rich people who don’t need it, mostly (for example, in the case of the Covid-19 PPE scandals) in return for goods and/or services that didn’t actually work.

If you believe people like Gary Stevenson (and I tend to), these people have then hoarded that wealth, using it only to buy assets – property or businesses, in order to make them too expensive for the rest of us to be able to afford.

These things may then be rented or sold back to us at a price so high that we need to go into debt (think how much a mortgage costs these days) and spend the rest of our lives trying to pay the money back to them, with interest, so they can sit back on their fat backsides, eating lotus or whatever it is the idle rich do.

Remember: the inflated prices they ask us to pay are entirely arbitrary. They don’t have to charge us the Earth for anything because they are already rich and don’t need the cash to support them; a far lower price would be enough for them to get by.

So (again) if that’s where the cash has gone and what it is doing there, why is this happening?

The answer can only be: to keep the rest of us down. By denying us properly-funded public services, they force us to pay for expensive private schemes that don’t work because of profiteering, and this keeps us poor. Because we are poor, we have to work like slaves to try to make ends meet.

And this is the logical conclusion of all the neoliberal politics of the last 40-50 years: the creation of a new slave state, toiling in the dirt to keep a tiny group of elite citizens in absolute luxury.

Am I mistaken?

If you think so, then ask yourself: Where is my £40,000?


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Why IS Labour backing banker bonuses so the children starve?

Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s decision that a Labour government will not reinstate a cap on bankers’ bonuses has stirred up a storm of opposition among left-wing organisations – and voters.

The cap limits yearly bonus payouts for bankers to twice their salary; it was introduced by the EU in 2014 when it was intended to prevent excessive risk-taking after the global financial crash of 2008.

Kwasi Kwarteng scrapped it in his 2022 mini-budget – sparking widespread outrage for rewarding bankers during a cost-of-living crisis and growing levels of poverty in Britain.

But Rishi Sunak maintained the policy, bringing it into force in October 2023.

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Talking to the BBC on January 31, Reeves said: “The cap on bankers’ bonuses was brought in in the aftermath of the global financial crisis and that was the right thing to do to rebuild the public finances.

“But that has gone now, and we don’t have any intention of bringing that back. And as chancellor of the exchequer, I would want to be a champion of a successful and thriving financial services industry in the UK.”

“Successful and thriving”? Or “Excessively risk-taking”? The latter seems more likely to This Writer and it seems Reeves and Labour leader Keir Starmer are deliberately planning to repeat New Labour’s worst mistakes.

That certainly seems to be the feeling among left-wing organisations and individuals, according to Left Foot Forward:

Labour’s grassroots left-wing organisation, Momentum, described it as a “terrible decision,” which is “totally out of touch with Labour’s values and public opinion.”

“For over 40 years our economic model has sucked wealth from the country and enriched a few in the City.

“It even crashed the economy in 2008. Yet instead of learning the lessons from New Labour’s failures, Starmer and Reeves seem determined to repeat them.”

The Peace & Justice Project, founded by the former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, said:

“Labour’s latest U-turn, the refusal to reinstate the cap on bankers’ bonuses, shows it is unwilling to challenge the establishment status quo…”

In a post on X, Corbyn asked: “Where is the justification for letting the rich get richer while children starve and people sleep rough on the streets?

“We cannot afford these obscene levels of inequality. It’s our job to offer a real alternative – one that puts human need before corporate greed.”

On the social media, I found this:

And “MrsGee” posted on ‘X’: “What about ‘uncertainty’ in peoples lives, in a profiteer-driven cost of living crisis @LabourSJ? What about millions of children in poverty, families unable to afford to eat & heat their homes? You want them to continue to suffer when you could help with a wealth tax? Poor show.”

Labour’s inconsistency in boosting bankers while pushing families into poverty by keeping the two-child cap on child benefit was also widely pilloried:

Apparently a Labour spokesperson said, “We are not in the business of telling business what to do about pay and conditions.”

But this is nonsense. Telling businesses what to do about pay and conditions is precisely what governments – or in this case, possible governments-in-waiting – should be doing.

Source: Labour to back bankers’ bonuses: How the Left responded – Left Foot Forward: Leading the UK’s progressive debate


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What really caused the inflation crisis? Here’s Gary to explain why rich people have your money

The real cause of inflation: the super-rich sucked up government cash that was given out to keep working- and middle-class people alive during the Covid crisis – by being the providers of the services and supplies everybody else needed. But that was a crisis and it should be time to normalise the situation. Why won’t politicians do it?

According to Gary Stevenson, governments like those in the UK and US caused the post-Covid inflation crisis by giving away thousands of pounds to keep us all going when the economy was locked down.

The problem was that those of us who normally work for a living had to then use that money to pay our bills (that’s not including This Writer; I just carried on writing Vox Political all the way through and lived on the money I earned from it, plus savings – those were happier days) while the rich, who issue the bills that we have to pay, just sucked up all the cash.

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They then started using that cash to buy what they could – not luxury items, because they were forbidden from doing it due to the shutdown of the economy, but so-called economic assets like houses. This stopped the rest of us from being able to buy them by keeping prices high – as Gary has discussed in previous clips.

Notice: he doesn’t say there was anything wrong with governments spending the money in the way they did; people needed cash to survive and it was inevitable that providing it to them from the Treasury, rather than the economy, would increase the national debt and massively increase wealth inequality between the poor who spent the cash and the rich who received it.

But because the circumstances were extraordinary, and the result was an unbalanced economy (increased inequality), the government should then have taken action to re-balance the economy by using the levers available to it to re-distribute the wealth.

It should have taxed the money back off the rich. Logically, the government could have got away with calling it a windfall tax because that’s what it would have been.

That hasn’t happened.

And neither of the ‘Big Two’ political parties – Labour and the Conservatives – are even considering such a rebalancing of the economy. Instead, they are both planning to bake it into our lives for a long time to come.

So we can say that Labour and the Tories both intend to increase wealth for the richest and poverty and debt for everybody else – and that includes those of you who are middle-class, sitting there smugly thinking you’ll be all right (you won’t).

There’s only one answer, but This Writer doubts many people will take it up.

You have to think for yourself.

That’s right; you have to get details of the political plans of every candidate standing in your constituency in the general election and you have to work out which of them – if any – intend to re-balance the economy to prevent us all falling into this debt trap.

How do you fancy that?

And politicians? Here’s a challenge for you:

Are you going to produce manifesto commitments to tax the money back off the super-rich – who don’t need it, remember – and re-balance the economy or are you too scared of them to dare upsetting them?


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Politicians are hell-bent on pushing us to fascism. Let Gary explain how to stop it.

After a six month hiatus, Gary Stevenson is back with a video clip discussing what has happened in the UK during that period. And it isn’t good.

Inflation is down. He explains why the Tories should take no credit for it.

Interest rates will start to fall, following inflation.

House prices, after rising during the Covid crisis, have not come down again – and Gary explains that this is because the rich have accumulated an enormous amount of money over the period since early 2020. They have used it to buy houses without mortgages, which is why prices have not fallen. And with high interest rates, their savings accounts are growing massively.

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As interest rates fall, rich people will invest their savings in buying houses, and this means prices will rise again.

Living standards have fallen with the rapid rise of inequality that came with the transfer of huge amounts of cash to the rich. Rents, the price of goods and the price of holidays will also increase. Young people will be very strongly harmed by these developments.

With living standards falling, and no political party in the UK serious about reducing inequality, people will be dissatisfied – whichever party is in office. People will want an alternative, and the populist far right is poised to promise them anything they want. This is why it is so terrifying that the Tory with the safest seat is Kemi Badenoch.

This risk is increased by the fact that the economy is failing – no matter what Rishi Sunak and his spokespeople say.

An accelerated shift towards fascism is inevitable unless a positive alternative can be presented.

Increasing equality will improve living standards and stave off the fall into fascism.

The challenge for us now is to encourage public opinion to support such measures.


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Keir Starmer’s economic growth plan doesn’t allow for contingencies. Awkward…

There are two serious flaws in Keir Starmer’s plan to fund public services by growing the economy.

While you’re watching this clip, have a go at working out what they are:

Firstly, economic growth doesn’t necessarily mean more money for the Treasury.

In order to put new public money into services, a responsible government (that isn’t borrowing) will need to tax a similar amount out of us all – and a responsible Labour government would ensure that such taxation is weighted to put most of the burden onto the rich and profitable businesses.

Has Keir Starmer publicised plans for a new taxation structure for the UK? No. He has been courting businesses because he wants their donations. In turn, this means they’ll want tax breaks from him, or they’ll threaten to remove their financial support.

So it is hard to envision much extra cash making its way into the public purse under Starmer (although we would see more of it than under the Tories, who want to cut both taxes and public services to the bone).

Worse still is this: Keir Starmer has no contingency plan if the economy does not grow.

Three times, in the interview above, he was asked to explain what he would do then – and all three times, his only answer was that he believes the economy will grow.

Faith is a wonderful thing, but you can’t fuel the economy of a developed western nation on hot air and fantasy.


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This video shows everything that’s wrong with Tory money policies

The clip in the tweet below was made for an election – but it doesn’t matter which, because it is just as relevant now.

It’s an attack on “trickle-down” politics that demonstrates the difference between putting money into the economy where it is needed, and draining it out by giving it to the already-rich who will do nothing with it.

The “trickle-down” argument has long since been demolished but the Tories haven’t changed their policy; they just changed the argument so it now relies on dubious morality.

But if you spread this video around a bit, fewer people will be fooled.


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Labour’s stance on inflation: all mouth and no trousers

Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves: their economic and anti-inflation policies aren’t intended to help working people in the slightest, it seems.

Cast your eyes over the following word salad from Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves, and This Writer’s own reply to it:

I call it “word salad” because that’s what it is – a random mixture of words and phrases suggestive of advanced schizophrenia.

Nothing in Rachel Reeves’s post actually means anything. She doesn’t explain how building the UK economy will boost growth, deliver jobs or bring down bills because she either doesn’t know – or knows that it won’t.

Most people are already in work, remember – so delivering more jobs won’t actually help unless they are better-paying jobs, and we already know that Keir Starmer’s Labour is against higher pay rises for working people. Like the Tories, that party is claiming such developments will only speed inflation.

And how does she expect to bring down bills? The cost of everything is still rising at the moment, albeit at a slower speed. Economists say if goods and services became cheaper, that might trigger a recession. So it seems this is not possible.

Making bills cheaper in real terms – as a percentage of household income – is impossible because Reeves will do nothing to increase wages for the lowest-paid workers.

Angela Rayner said much the same when challenged by the BBC’s Sally Nugent:

She mentions getting waiting lists down so more people are work, and paying properly for public services – but these require more spending by the government. Does that mean Labour will tax the people more? Otherwise we’re into another inflationary spiral.

And which people will Labour tax, if it has to? The working poor or the super-rich? Given the number of Labour representatives who are receiving massive donations from the super-rich, I think we all know the answer to that.

Here’s a social media post from “The Labour Party”, highlighting a Sky News article:

The article itself doesn’t mention anything Keir Starmer’s party would do until its penultimate paragraph, in which – amid the now-familiar nonsense mantra about boosting growth, boosting wages and bringing down bills, Shadow Economic Secretary Tulip Siddiq states:

“If Labour were in power today, we would introduce a proper windfall tax on the huge profits the oil and gas giants are making to help families with the cost of living.

So Starmer’s answer is indeed taxing somebody to keep extra government spending from boosting inflation.

Well, he’d better hope there’s an election soon because otherwise those energy firms will have given away all those profits as shareholder dividends and… Didn’t Starmer already promise not to tax wealth?

Here’s a thought:

Rather than make a big fuss while talking a lot of nonsense, why not have a look around the world at economies that actually work for their people and see what they’re doing right that the UK isn’t?

They could start with Denmark, perhaps:

The fact that Keir Starmer’s crowd is not doing that – is actually refusing to consider practical, proven alternatives, suggests that there is no intention to change the situation. not by one iota.

Starmer and his motley crew know you are being hammered by the high cost of living, every day.

We must conclude that it is Labour policy to continue grinding your face into the dirt.

The news in tweets: Monday, July 17, 2023

Ruling-class privilege: there’s no ‘class ceiling’ for grotesqueries like Rachel Reeves and Keir Starmer – they are laughing at you when they say they can’t do anything to help you. Remember: it is political choice that has dumped the UK in its current crisis.

Backlash against Starmer’s Substitute Tory Party grows as he insists he’ll do nothing for ordinary people

It’s a good question. Jeremy Corbyn promised to provide dentistry on the National Health Service but Keir Stürmer is promising to deny it to more people (although he hasn’t said it in as many words).

He’s also planning to inject much more privatisation into the NHS, probably to complete the transformation of the service into nothing more than a banner under which public money may be passed to private companies that perpetuate illness and refuse to provide cover where it is not profitable, making healthcare a postcode lottery:

More privatisation?

Read this:

There’s the problem with more privatisation in a nutshell. Once these private health bloodsuckers get a monopoly on the provision of care, they’ll push prices through the roof – knowing that you and I will have to pay for it, no matter what.

By supporting increased private involvement in healthcare, Starmer supports this plan to drain the public purse of its funds and effectively put you into debt to grotesquely rich corporate fatcats – forever.

He’s being nicknamed #SirKidStarver because he won’t end the two-child limit on child benefit and is therefore continuing to impose poverty on millions of children, nor will he provide free school meals for everybody who needs them.

Stürmer’s ‘Right-hand Liar’, Yvette Cooper, was pressed to justify the policy that will deliberately keep a quarter of a million children in poverty and 850,000 more in increased poverty, on the morning media round. Judge her failure by this clip:

Labour’s answer to criticism is apparently to say we should vote for the Substitute Tory Party because its members have ancestors who were working class:

It seems Stürmer and all his little stürmtroopers need a lesson on how a Labour Party governs a nation. Here’s one:

The consensus opinion is increasingly that Stürmer is lying:

Thankfully not everyone, even in the Parliamentary Labour Party, supports the wholesale betrayal of Labour Party values that Stürmer is preparing:

And outside the party, some of us are already agitating for direct action:

The article states that Stürmer is actively planning to fail the nation on many levels:

– Climate change
– Renewables
– Transport reform
– The economy
– Public sector pay
– The NHS
– Social care
– Education
– Law and order
– Housing
– Trade unions
– Reversing Tory policy
– Support for local government
– Electoral reform
– Europe
– Interest rates
– Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland
– Defence
– Inequality
– Taxing the rich

It calls for us to make Stürmer as uncomfortable as possible, for as long as possible, on all those issues until the pressure on him to reform becomes unsurmountable and he is forced to change.

How to do this?

– Inform yourself
– Join groups
– Talk to people
– Write to MPs, councillors and anyone else
– Phone in to the radio (you are likely to get on)
– Consider peaceful protest
– Join a union if it is appropriate for you
– Write a blog
– Comment here
– Tweet, Thread, use Mastodon, create a YouTube, TikTok or Instagram post.

But just don’t suffer in silence. Starmer has to know he is failing, already. Only then might he change, or be forced to. Things are far too serious to accept the dire policy options as those Starmer is now proposing. We all have to demand better.

And in the short term there is only one option: anyone who understands how bad the situation is at the moment must vote for anybody but Labour or the Conservatives. Who the other party to support may be will only be apparent locally.

The best places to start are at Somerton and Frome, Selby and Ainsty, and Uxbridge and South Ruislip on Thursday (July 20, 2023).

Where is the evidence that the Tories are ‘transforming’ the economy?

It seems that the only evidence of any such action by the Conservatives is a plan to close down what Rishi Sunak calls “rip-off” degrees that don’t guarantee a job to graduates.

It seems a strange demand – that degree courses guarantee a job to the people taking them. By that standard, shouldn’t they all be shut down and a multi-billion pound education industry destroyed overnight?

You see, the point of most degrees isn’t to fit people into a job; it is to teach people how to think. That way, they can work out how to get, for themselves, the job that best suits them. This policy reveals Tory ideology: they don’t want people who can think – they just want livestock who can be slotted into jobs that will make money for their friends and funders:

But it’s hard to tell, because it seems the Tories are doing their utmost to hide what they are doing – probably because the only people they are helping are themselves.

Example:

How about the way government departments under the Tories have been blacklisting media organisations that publish information that is critical of them? Here’s Defence Secretary Ben Wallace apologising for such treatment of Declassified UK:

What else do they not want us to know?

Perhaps the fact that yet another Tory MP has been arrested – for sexual impropriety and misconduct in public office?

Perhaps the fact that 2022 was the worst year for real wage growth in nearly half a century since the early 1970s, meaning their fairy story that increases in your wages are fuelling inflation is a lie?

Perhaps the fact that they spent more than one-and-a-half times as much money on duff Covid-related contracts through their illegal “VIP lane” as they have allocated to the building of new NHS hospitals?

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