The coalition government wreckless slash-and-burn economics has reached crisis point today, with the news that a nuclear weapons base will possibly be privatised, and sold off to foreign corporations. Yesterday, Harriet Harman (Labour) reffered to the Cheif Secretary to the Treasury, Danny Alexander (Lib Dem) as a "ginger rodent". Forget giner rodent, any government that allows nuclear weapons to be controlled by private corporations for profit deserves much harsher criticism. It is simply impossible to express the utter ludicrosity of a government that thinks it needs to privatise our nuclear weapons, whilst letting companies like Vodafone off an incredible £6billion in tax, according to a recent investigation by Private Eye. No wonder the exchequer is short of money. Osborne must be pretty desperate if we are seriously considering privating nuclear weapons. He insits that making cuts is the only option, although it is obviously neccessary to point out the alternatives that he is obviously reluctant to spew forth.
1) -Cut down on the £12 bn pounds British Companies fail to pay in tax each year, saving £48 billion over the 5 year parliament, making more than half of the £83 billion cuts unneccessary.
2) -Start selling the £850 bn pounds worth of bank assets we own from the bailout. Use this money to fund defecit spending, thus reducing the debt burden, reducing interest payments, freeing up more public money to be spent on services, not debt.
3) - Cut VAT to 12% (the treasuries own economic forecasting software shows this would be the optimal level for growth and low inflation), instead of increasing it to 20% simply for the sake of avoiding tax rises for the wealthy. VAT is a regressive tax, which means that the poorest in society will pay more of it as a percentage of their incomes, because poorer people spend more of their incomes on purchasing things, rather than making investments, or saving, as the rich can afford to do.
4) - Instead of privatizing our Nuclear Missile bases to US companies, actually sell the missiles themselves to the US. The US government grows keener and keener, year on year to throw more and more money over to the Pentagon, so why not supply what they want when the demand (and thus price) is high. By 2013 they are expected to have a "defence" budget of over $1 trillion, that's 1 thousand thousand thousand thousand. The yanks could do with a few more nukes ;).
5) - The government has to stop allowing the Bank of England to print money under the guise of the "quantitative easing" program. Simply printing money only redistributes value from those who have money to those who print it. By inflating the money supply, the government is artificially confiscating value from our money in order to prop up the banks.
Whilst Cameron keeps to the shadows, wheeling out his cronies to do the nasty work, it is the Liberal Democrats who are rightly picking up the brunt of voter fury. Whilst Alan Johnson will claim that the government is cutting for "ideological reasons", that is only what the government should be doing. We can't complain that the conservatives are doing what they promised. Unsatisfied voters should blame the Liberals. They have broken nearly every election pledge they made, most notably the "no rise in tuition fees" scam. If our economic system recognized "effort" in the same way it did money, then the electorate, consumers of political services, could ask for their votes back. The idea of recall was backed by Clegg and Co at election time, but as soon as he get's power, we haven't heard another whisper about the idea. Sadly some voters have short memories and even shorter minds. Whilst the politicians deserve some of the blame for tricking people into believe that we were "on the brink of bankruptcy", the voters have swallowed this nonsense with the trust that a 5 year old has in their schoolteacher.
Osbourne's fantasy about the "brink of bankruptcy" is really the brink of b******t, and he knows it. Perhaps if Labour were sharper than resorting to the same old adversarial, fact lacking debate that plagued the chambers of parliament when they were in power, then voters might begin to see past the myriad of propaganda that the Tory machine churns out. According to a recent press release, the first meeting after Cameron got to Downing St was with the publishing tycoon Rupert Murdoch. What this says about his priorities is simply disgraceful. If we were on "the brink of bankruptcy", the why, Mr Cameron was it Murdoch, not Mervin (the governor of the Bank of England) who got the first meeting at number 10? Since Cameron, Clegg and chums do not comprehend the complexities of bankruptcy, I will point out that to be bankrupt is to be insolvent, and to be insolvent is to be inable to pay your debts. Since the budget that Osborne inherited had less than 10% allocated to debt repayment, far from the over 100% that would qualify the country for liquidation procedures, and since Osborne obviously read the Darling budget he inherited in depth, there is evidently something fishy going on.
Economic bankruptcy is the least of our worries. It is the inability of governments present and past to quantify the perilous approach towards social, environmental and now moral bankruptcy that epitomizes the corrupt back room politics that brought the current lot into power. It is neither Liberal, Democratic, nor Conservative to rush through a fiscally regressive, barnstorm budget, like the one we witnessed back in June. Nor is it Liberal, Democratic, nor Conservative to shut off the freedom of opportunity that is afforded by having a home. The government's planned £400 per week cap on Housing benefit, the £26,000 a year family cap on benefits overall, no exceptions (what about the single mum in Manchester with 15 children...), oh and the fat new tution fees of £9,000, and the petty, meagre, £1 billion pound "Green Investment Bank" that will only be funded in 2013, and no years other than that, that will drive the oxymoron of "sustainable growth" (on a finite planet), let alone the countless other morally, socially, and envionrmentally bankrupt policies that the Clegg, Camermon, Cable, cohort subscribe to.
Sadly, voters will probably switch back to Labour at the next election. Whilst they didn't get us "into this mess", no, the US subprime mortage crisis did, they could have opted out of the costly wars in Iraq, Afganistan and Sierra Leone, instead putting the money aside in some sort crisis funded to deal with future crises'. The thing is, every one with the slightest knowledge of economics knows well that we move from boom to bust. History shows that the bigger the boom the bigger the bust, but when Brown had is boom, he boasted that he "had abolished the economic cycle". How can you abolish something that is driven by human instinct? People invest, make money, run out of money, and then cut back, and the economy goes bang. That's what happens. If Osbornes medicine is to dig us out the ditch, the more successful he is, the greater we will fall next time. By that time, it will be the next government's job to jumpstart the engine. If that government is only going to repeat the mistakes of the past, then it is time for a different type of government. Currently, we have a situation where each is worse than the one before, so voters get fed up quicker, vote for a new one, which is even worse, and then after getting fed up with that one, switch back the lot that seemed so bad before. At least, this is what the media would like you to believe.
Instead, it is only the small number of swing voters to decide the path of the country. Since it is these "floating voters", no matter how they come to their decision, that really choose governments, isn't it time for every party loyalist; left, right and center, to really reconsider their allegiances. Only with a wholesale awakening of these die-hards, can we remove the oligopoly of these "floating" few who sit at the steering wheel in our democratic bus. If people were allowed to make a negative vote, as well as their positive one, then elections would better reflect how humans really think, rather than arrogantly assuming that support is not matched by opposition. Responsiblity now lies with the news media to bring about the reboot.
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