Osborne’s cuts are a sham and a distraction: the citizen is being asked to pay for greedy bureaucrats and incompetent politicians
Count Heinrich Dickermann….the o is silent
Freuderbirds are go. Or not, as the case may be. Virgil Tracy lookalike Lord Freud (left) had
his strings showing somewhat yesterday when he tried to suggest in the
Lords that it was “difficult to make the causal connection” between Food
Banks and Government welfare cuts. Given all the variables involved, it
probably is; but there’s also a thing called common sense. The irony
remains that while some people must be feeling the pinch because of cuts, the cuts are not doing the job they were meant to do: reduce the UK budget deficit.Food Banks are like roads: open one up, and people will use them. But in many ways, Freud was being disingenuous in restricting his defence to welfare cuts. There are two other very big factors involved here, and the Government tries to avoid getting into a debate on them. Even worse, the Labour Opposition fails to make them discuss it.
The first is that the world is spiralling into an economic slump that has been gathering for more than eighteen months. That’s why most people are feeling the strain – along with zero interest rates for pensioners: they, um, haven’t got a job. Ahbutahbutahbut say Camerlot, unemployment is not rising! I’m sick to death of this line: count the hours being worked, and employment is falling; poll working people, and 23% of them say they would like to work longer hours. It is dishonest bollocks, which on the Slog’s Bollockometer scores way more highly than ill-informed bollocks.
The second is that these cuts are like pissing into the Pacific in a bid to raise global sea levels. The aggregate to date (as far as I could glean from government data haha yesterday) is around £19billion. It would be more, but Whitehall politics and delaying tactics have undermined much of it – aka, civil servants refusing to fire themselves tch tch. However, even if it were £30 billion, it would still be just under a tenth of the £375 billion thrown at QE thus far by the Bank of England…and as a welcoming gift to Mark Carney last week, a further £70 billion on top of that was announced.
Let’s be real here, folks. Britain’s exploding national debt has been caused by four medium-term factors, in exactly this order of magnitude: bailing out the banks, illegal increases in Whitehall pension emoluments, Quantitative Easing, and New Labour overspending from 2003-7. You can argue up hill and down dale until the cows come home to roost in the rhubarb trees, but those facts are indisputable. That national debt is only manageable because of Zirp – which is why we have Zirp, and why all we supposedly filthy rich baby-boomers have seen a 95% cut in our savings income. Because of all these factors, people have less money to spend, and so both independent and multiple retailers are going up the pictures…creating yet more unemployment.
That reality is brought into sharp focus by figures available this morning from the British Retail Consortium. These new stats reveal how average high street prices fell by 0.2% during June alone. They also fell in May. So we have trouble right here in Cool Britannia/With a capital T and that rhymes with D/And that stands for Deflation.
This was always going to happen, but for those of you who are hard of maths (for example, the entire House of Commons) let me point out that the annualised rate of deflation at constant growth from those two months is around 3%. And with all of us paying more for fewer government services – and earning 30% less than we did ten years ago in real terms – personal disposable income ain’t gonna go up, is it? Er, no.
Anyway, given that their illegal nest-feathering accounts for 37% of our whopping debt, what do the Sir Humphreys have to say about it all? Well, about their embezzlement of course, nothing. But this is what the most senior trougher of the lot, Cabinet Secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood, had to say yesterday:
“The cuts made to public services to date are not sufficient, and austerity measures will have to continue for at least another four years….we still have a very, very long way to go. This is not a two-year project or a five-year project. This is a 10-year project, a 20-year generational battle to beef up the economy.”
Now technically, he’s right: the cuts are nowhere near sufficient….to counteract his pension increase, banker madness, Thatcherite industrial destruction, troughing MPs, poor New Labour budgetary control, and the Bank of England spending like poolswinners to keep the entire mess looking vaguely normal.
But do we see all Whitehall budgets going down? We do not. Do we see a ban on bonuses in taxpayer-owned banks until their balance sheets are fully repaired? We do not. Do we see Tony Blair facing treason charges for an expensively illegal war? We do not. Do we see banks supporting SME manufacturing? We do not: we see them defrauding the poor buggers.
What we get, ladies and gentlemen, is cuts. Sloggers know well enough by now that I am the whistle for no side when it comes to politics: I would clear them all out and start again were you to show some wisdom and anoint me as Elizabeth II’s rightful heir with Divine Right powers. We’re simply talking commercial strategy here – nothing more, nothing less: the cuts are a pointless sham designed to impress the markets. They never could and never will make so much as a scratch on the giant 200 megaton lead weight called the National Debt. They’re no more use to us than the Troika’s cuts are in Greece, Italy, Spain, Ireland and Portugal. And they are just as cynically misguided.
But as Sir Jeremiah Deadwood wants every belt to be pulled in, let’s assess a few pertinent facts.
While cuts in the Civil Service budgets have occurred (at around 8%), these have now run out of steam: the usual discreet fightback is taking place, in that seven departments saw increases in the headcount during Q1 2013. The Department for Energy and Climate Change – fancy that – has seen its numbers go up 10%. All those wind turbines take a lot of looking after, you see: I bet they’re hiring casual labour to keep the blades turning. You’ve heard of the jobless recovery – now meet DECC’s windless turbines.
As for Heywood’s own mob in the Cabinet Office, their budget for 2011-12 was an unbelievable £2.1 billion…with a further £500million for ‘capital expenditure’. What capital does a Cabinet Office require that costs half a billion quid? Is Jeremy drinking Gold Blend or gold leaf? The Cabinet Office thing employs 2080 people. Over 2000 people to run an office.
This is their job description related to ‘principal role’: ‘facilitating collective decision-making by the Cabinet, through running and supporting Cabinet-level committees.’
Yes, you’re right: this is Sir Humphrey’s Ministry of administrative affairs brought to life. What’s the matter with Cabinet ministers, can’t they make their own minds up? If Cabinet Committees have a Chair, why do they need ‘running’? Can we define support here – do they fall over a lot or something?
As well as having Heywood as the Cabinet Secretary, the Cabinet Office also has a Permanent Secretary. Why? is Sir Jeremy part time then?
In addition, the Cabinet Office ‘helps to ensure that a wide range of Ministerial priorities are taken forward across Whitehall’ – or put another way, makes sure zat ordahs are beink obate.
Two point five billion bloody quid to do that. But is the Cabinet Office good at that? Er, no. In fact, it’s crap at it.
As The Times reported two months ago, one third of the Government’s 200 biggest projects are either over-budget or late. So given a 1 in 3 Snafu rate, are we getting value for that £2.5 billion? I think not. Heywood has promised to “reduce costs by some 35% by 2015″. I could show him the way to achieve a 100% cut tomorrow.
If the Public Accounts Committee, the Ministry of Justice, and the Crown Prosecution Service moved against the post 2005 illegally-awarded Whitehall pension increases, they could remove all of the money back to balance of payments and put those involved in the fraud to work at Her Majesty’s Pleasure. If the Coalition cut 50% of Whitehall and local government’s unelected numbers, the only thing we’d notice is a 15% cut in the National Debt.
But our legislators aren’t going to do that, because Whitehall knows where every last smelly body is walled up behind every closet. It’s called blackmail, and it’s the same blackmail being applied in Greece, Spain and Portugal: all-knowing bureacrats who know everything about legislator dishonesty….but nothing about how to run a country.
Some people have been taking the piss on Welfare over the years. Most haven’t. The Osborne cuts are chicken sh*t compared to economic stimulation and bureaucrat troughing. Yet Labour seems unable to land a punch, or offer a clear alternative.
Here’s why: they wouldn’t make any difference, because they wouldn’t dare do what needs to be done either. We do not have ‘a fiscal problem’ in this country: we have four huge needs. They are radical constitutional reform, drastic economic reconfiguration, population control, and Big, wasteful government. It is simply one more aspect of Vulnerable Small paying for the sins of Big Controlling.
Politicians from all our major Parties created those problems. I will leave you to join up the dots.
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