Today, we saw the latest round of the vile media witch hunt against the resistance, as reporters stooped so low as to claim that spraying anarchist symbols on a police van is an "act of violence". Poor van, I'm sure diddums is feeling rather sore right now. No, obviously not, it's a police van, not a human being or an animal, so it does not have what we might call a "central nervous system". As a matter of fact, there has been next to no actually violence at any of the student protests over the last 2 weeks. There have been scuffles with the police, which did leave some injured, but since the protesters never intended to hurt the police, there is a lack of good old "mens rea" (intention) when it comes to the term "violence". No, perhaps there was the odd bit of "vandalism", fair enough, but claiming that a protest is violence, just because 1% of the group choose to do some graffiti, is a bit over the top.
Plus, it's not the just Daily Mail who are doing this any more. The BBC have equally been detracting from the whole point by talking about tiny minorities and excusing it away by saying "we only report what goes on" (sic). Now don't get me wrong, the guy who threw a fire extinguisher at riot police from the roof of the Millbank complex was wrong in what he did, but you can't ignore the thousands of protesters who a peacefully demonstrated against the planned cuts to higher education, and the ensuing increase in tuition fees.
You see, when Osborne talks of the need to tackle the debt, he is being so ignorant to the fact that he is not actually getting rid of any debt at all. He is just shifting it to those who are less able to pay. Why Mr. Osborne, will you be charging us a "market interest rate", when what this really means is a "consumer interest rate", pegged 3 or so percentage points above inflation, when the government will actually make a profit on this, since they only pay 1.5% to borrow the money, or less if they just print it. Is this policy, by any chance, a favour to your private banking chums who paid for the election? Now just in case your lawyers are taking a peek at this blog, this is not an accusation, only a theory. The thing that bugs me is that if "Britain was on the brink of bankruptcy" (sic) Mr. Osborne, due to a crippling government debt burden, then why did the private sector not take us down the drain years ago? To understand this question, we need the statistics part.
Whilst the Tories talk of the monstrously big "state" that gobbles up 53% of our GDP, and has debt of around 70% of GDP, they forget to mention that debt in the other 47% of the economy accounts is a whopping 400% of GDP. Osborne is also keen to remind us that if we don't cut spending quickly, we will end up in the same situation as Ireland. So let's examine the lies, damned lies and statistics for this claim. Firstly, the Ireland case study is not new in Mr. Osborne's miscellany of excuses. He wheeled it out 3 years ago, when Ireland started cutting spending in the recession. When he wanted to give the Labour government advice, he simply said "look across the Irish sea". As for the result of this, all I can do is to repeat his grand old saying. "Look across the Irish sea George, and learn this time..., look and learn..."
Oh and when he boasts that our interest rates have come down, I would suggest that this isn't so much that the market has more confidence in the government for cutting spending (it hasn't yet), but that the market has run out of countries to go to who haven't already bankrupted themselves with pointless austerity.
As for student fees, since university education provides a benefit to the whole of society, why does he want to shift the burden of payment away from the taxpayer to the student? You don't even need a progressive system of student debt repayment, you've got one anyway, and it works even if people don't earn £21,000. It's progressive, and it's called, da da da, the TAX SYSTEM! Remember who pays the poor man's benefit; yeah, it's the rich, well trained man who WENT TO UNIVERSITY *in most cases. Oxford university announced recently that it costs them £16,000 to educate one student per year. So sending every 18 year old in the country off to an Oxford quality education would cost less than thirty billion. Now how would we get that money? Simples. Print it. The bank of England is already printing hundreds of billions of pounds in their "quantitative easing" money printing programme, so why not just grease up your money machines and start "quantitatively easing students, not bankers" Mervin King?
As for Osborne, all I can say is "Look at the facts George, and learn."
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