Labour’s spending plan could humiliate the Tories

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bond, borrow, Conservative, debt, deficit, economic, economy, growth, increase, interest rate, Labour, loan, mortgage, neoliberal, plan, public, spending, stimulate, taxation, Tories, Tory, Treasury

“There is an alternative” – and it doesn’t have to cost more than we’re spending now.

It seems some people are upset that Labour has announced it does not intend to increase public spending, if elected into office after next year’s general election.

This is a perfectly reasonable reaction, depending on the amount of information available to the person holding that opinion.

In other words, if you don’t know why Labour has made this decision, it is perfectly reasonable to assume that the former Party of The Left has turned Tory-lite.

That’s why we’re hearing that Labour will simply continue Tory policies; that the main three parties are “all in it together” (to overuse a hackneyed and devalued phrase).

But evidence is available to suggest that this is a big mistake.

To finance extra spending, Labour would have to borrow more money – but this would push up interest rates and create a potential disaster for people with mortgages and loans to pay off.

According to Modern Monetary Theory – an economic method that seems to have earned credence with all the main parties – government borrowing is not undertaken to finance its spending, but to maintain a target interest rate.

In times of recession, businesses borrow more and households find it hard to save money for a rainy day (as the saying goes). We have spent most of the last decade either in recession or in the slowest recovery in British history and the private sector simply doesn’t have the spare cash to pay higher interest demanded on loans in the wake of higher government borrowing.

Labour wants to safeguard those businesses; Labour wants to safeguard your homes.

The alternative would cost any government much more in the long run.

It’s as simple as that.

So Labour has set a spending target that is the same as the Conservatives’, ensuring that interest rates can be kept under control.

This doesn’t mean it will continue with Conservative-led spending plans. That would be a betrayal of Labour’s core voters.

Instead, it seems more likely that Labour will seek to stimulate the economy by taking funding away from wasteful areas – this blog would certainly wish to see less public money given to private contractors who pocket half of it as profit – and investing it in economic growth.

With more money flowing through the system and coming back to the Treasury in taxation, it will then become easier to relax restrictions on interest rates, which will help the government with its debt issue (this has to do with the way governments borrow money, issuing bonds at fixed rates of interest, and is a story for another day).

If Labour’s plan works, it will mean humiliation for the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats, as Labour will have spent exactly the same amount doing it as those other parties have been spending for the previous five years – to little effect.

Do not misunderstand; it is perfectly possible that Labour’s spending plans could be entirely wrong-headed! Labour spent most of the last 20 years experimenting disastrously with neoliberal thinking that, continued and concentrated by the Coalition government, has led us to the current pretty pass.

In this case, it seems the Devil really is in the detail.

But the overarching strategy is sound and Labour should not be criticised for it.

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If Osborne’s critics are wrong, why did the economy do exactly what we said?

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austerity, benefit, claimant, cycle, death, economic, economy, fiscal, George Osborne, growth, help to buy, housing bubble, Iain Duncan Smith, inflation, keynes, long term, manipulate, manipulating, manipulation, Media, Mike Sivier, mikesivier, plan, purge, recovery, stagnation, stimulus, UK, unemployment, Vox Political, wage

What an embarrassment: George Osborne should be ashamed of the rubbish he spouted in his speech yesterday (Friday).

George Osborne is flailing.

He’s a desperate man, trying vainly to convince us that the current state of the British economy was his plan all along when anybody with half a brain can see it wasn’t.

Yesterday he was in Washington, trying to convince Americans that he knows what he is doing, but US economists are far too canny to accept anything he says at face value.

His principal claim was that critics of what he and the ConDem inner circle still laughably call “the government’s long-term economic plan” have been proved “comprehensively wrong”. Some of us would like to see his proof of that.

Back in 2010, when Osborne took over at the Treasury, trashed a perfectly good Labour-stimulated recovery and sent the economy into freefall, those of us with any sense said the situation would worsen until it hit the point at which the economy would stabilise of its own accord, without any interference from politicians. Then it would start to improve because demand would start to rise again.

We reached the lowest point possible in the British economic cycle; from there, the only way was up. That is why there is a recovery – and a mean, meagre little thing it is, too. We should be 20-25 percentage points above where we are. Instead, we’re 1.4 per cent behind our pre-recession peak and the money is going to the wrong people.

The only question you should be asking is why this Tory illiterate has held us back.

Osborne told America that the British economy was growing faster than any other in the G7 – which means nothing. When an economy has shrunk more than any other, it is easier for it to grow. It doesn’t mean that our economy will be bigger than the others, although that is certainly the impression that Osborne wants to convey.

He said the growth was “despite warnings from some that our determined pursuit of our economic plan made that [economic growth] impossible”. This was a lie.

Osborne knows perfectly well that nobody said growth was impossible. They said Osborne’s policy would delay any recovery, causing misery for millions of medium- and low-waged people and providing a spurious justification for his colleague Iain Duncan Smith’s purges of benefit claimants – actions that have caused many thousands of unnecessary deaths.

Apparently, to quote members of a previous Tory government, that is “a price worth paying”. For what?

He said: “Fiscal consolidation [austerity] and economic recovery go together, and [the economic turnaround in the UK] undermines the pessimistic prognosis that only further fiscal stimulus can drive sustainable growth.” This is not what the data shows. It shows, as already stated, that the British economy hit rock-bottom under Osborne’s guidance and has now started the long climb upward of its own accord. That is not an endorsement of his policy; fiscal stimulus along Keynesian lines would have arrested the decline and boosted the economy back into growth – as evidenced four years ago, when Osborne inherited an economy that had been growing for five consecutive quarters and sent it right back into decline.

Osborne claimed, yet again, that a Keynesian scheme would create more debt – denying the simple economic fact that the boost it would have provided would have put more money into the Treasury and cancelled the debt far more quickly than his cuts.

It’s obvious, really. Any growth is despite austerity, not because of it. If you take money out of a system, it’s harder for anybody to make a profit on which tax can be paid. Economics 101, George. But you studied history, didn’t you? And towel-folding.

We should also remember that in Osborne’s first Budget he promised – promised – a “steady and sustained” economic recovery. Instead, we had three years in which the economy flatlined. Then he brought in ‘Help to Buy’ – a very crude fiscal stimulus scheme that has created a housing price bubble that is hugely damaging for low earners while putting money into the pockets of people who don’t need it. The economy picked up, because housing relies on other industries, but the crash that is to come might create a worse situation than before.

Osborne wants us to believe that wages will start to rise above inflation, even though the experience of the Americans to whom he delivered his speech is that 95 per cent of post-recession growth went to the richest one per cent of the population. He wants us to believe living standards will improve, but there is no evidence for this at all.

It’s all just another big lie.

Just take a look around you and you’ll see the facts. Osborne was charged with keeping the economy on its knees because that is what the Tories needed, in order to suck the cash from the middle-class, working-class and unemployed people of the UK.

Tories need mass unemployment to maintain the UK as a low-wage economy, creating more profit for bosses while keeping the workers under the cosh.

They need stagnation in much of the economy in order to ensure that the deficit does not go away and the national debt rises, thereby making it possible from them to continue selling off the National Health Service and dismantling the welfare state.

They need a housing bubble in places like London, to ensure that it is too expensive for undesirable poor and middle-income people, ship them out to other towns that have suffered the planned decimation of their economic bases (in order to ensure that they could not make a better living there), and make the capital city a playground for the rich.

And they have done it all by manipulating the media into telling you the worst lies about your own well-being – lies like those in George Osborne’s speech yesterday.

The last 40 years of British history represent the worst decline in living standards for the British people in the entire history of our nation. Never before did we have as much as when the Conservatives came to office in 1979; never before did we have so much to lose.

And we gave it away to liars like George Osborne, just because they had honey on their forked tongues.

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Iain Duncan Smith’s new plan to prolong child poverty

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addiction, afford, allowance, benefit, bill, breakdown, child, childcare, Chris Goulden, Coalition, Conservative, consultation, credit, cut, debt, Democrat, Department, draft, DWP, education, employed, employment, families, family, fuel, government, housing, Iain Duncan Smith, IDS, income, inflation, job, jobless, joseph rowntree foundation, JRF, lending, Lib Dem, Liberal, low income, Low Pay Commission, Mike Sivier, mikesivier, minimum wage, part-time, payday, Pensions, people, personal, place, plan, politics, poverty, proposal, pupil premium, sanction, school meal, social security, strategy, tax, teacher, Tories, Tory, unemployed, unemployment, union, Universal Credit, uprating, Vox Political, water, welfare, work, working, workless

Iain Duncan Smith wants to talk about child poverty – but how can we take him seriously when he starts the discussion with a lie?

“Recent analysis reveals that children are three times as likely to be in poverty in a workless family and there are now fewer children living in workless households than at any time since records began, having fallen by 274,000 since 2010,” according to the Department for Work and Pensions’ press release on the new consultation.

Oh really?

According to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF), child poverty will rise from 2.5 million to 3.2 million during the 2010-2015 Parliament – around 24 per cent of all the children in the UK. By 2020, if the rise is not stopped, it will increase to four million – around 30 per centof all children in the UK.

Under the Coalition government, the number of people in working families who are living in poverty – at 6.7 million – has exceeded the number in workless and retired families who are in poverty – 6.3 million – for the first time.

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation has measured poverty, using several indicators, for more than 15 years; its figures are far more likely to be accurate than those of the government, which is still defining poverty as an income of less than 60 per cent of median (average) earnings. Average earnings are falling, so fewer people are defined as being in poverty – but that doesn’t make the money in their pockets go any further.

“The previous government’s target to halve child poverty by 2010 was not achieved,” states the DWP press release. Then it comes out with more nonsense: “The government is committed to ending child poverty in the UK by 2020 and the draft child poverty strategy sets out the government’s commitment to tackle poverty at its source.” From the JRF figures alone, we know that government policy is worsening the situation – or has everyone forgotten that 80,000 children woke up homeless last Christmas morning?

Let’s look at the government’s plans.

The DWP claims “reforming the welfare system through Universal Credit… will lift up to 300,000 children out of poverty, and cover 70 per cent of childcare costs for every hour worked”. But we know that Universal Credit is effectively a benefit cut for everyone put onto it; they won’t get as much as they do on the current benefits, and the one per cent uprating limit means falling further into poverty every year. Also, we found out this week that the housing element will be subject to sanctions if people in part-time jobs cannot persuade their employers to give them more hours of work. The claim is ridiculous.

The DWP claims the government will will increase investment in the Pupil Premium, provide free school meals for all infant school children from September this year, improve teacher quality, fund 15 hours of free early education places per week for all three- and four-year-old children and extend 15 hours of free education and care per week to two-year-olds from low income families. None of these measures will do anything to “tackle poverty at its source”. Tackling poverty at its source means ending the causes of poverty, not putting crude metaphorical sticking-plasters over the effects – which could be removed at any time in the future.

The DWP claims the government will cut tax for 25 million people by increasing the personal tax allowance, and cut income tax for those on the minimum wage by almost two-thirds. This means people will have more money in their pocket – but will it be enough, when benefit cuts and sanctions are taken into account? Will their pay increase with the rate of inflation? There is no guarantee that it will. And this move means the government will collect less tax, limiting its ability to provide services such as poverty-reduction measures.

The DWP claims the government will reduce water and fuel costs, and attack housing costs by building more homes. The first two measures may be seen as responses to aggressive policy-making by the Labour Party, and the last will only improve matters if the new dwellings are provided as social housing. Much of the extra spending commitment is made for 2015 onwards, when the Conservative-led Coalition may not even be in office.

These are plans to prolong poverty, not end it.

It is notable that the DWP press release repeats many of the proposals in an attempt to pretend it is doing more. Take a look at the list and count for yourself the number of times it mentions fuel/energy bills (three times) and free school meals (twice).

In fact, the only measures that are likely to help reduce the causes of poverty are far down the list: Increasing access to affordable credit by expanding credit unions and cracking down on payday lending (at the very bottom – and we’ll have to see whether this really happens because payday lenders are generous donors to the Conservative party); and reviewing – mark that word, ‘reviewing’ – the national minimum wage, meaning that the government might increase the minimum wage in accordance with Low Pay Commission recommendations.

The DWP press release quotes Iain Duncan Smith, who said the consultation re-states the government’s commitment to tackle poverty at its source, “be it worklessness, family breakdown, educational failure, addiction or debt”.

The measures he has proposed will not improve anybody’s chance of finding a job, nor will they prevent family breakdown, or addiction. The plans for education have yet to be tested and may not work. The plan for debt involves annoying Conservative Party donors.

The JRF has responded to the consultation diplomatically, but there can be no mistaking the impatience behind the words of Chris Goulden, head of poverty research. He said: “Given that it has been over a year since the initial consultation on child poverty measures, we are disappointed that the government is now going to take even longer to agree what those indicators will be.

“With one in four families expected to be in poverty by 2020, a renewed strategy to address child poverty is vital. Any effective strategy should be based on evidence and contain measures to reduce the cost of living and improve family incomes. However, until those measures are agreed, it is difficult to see how the government can move forward.”

Don’t be too concerned about moving forward, Chris.

This government is backsliding.

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Private company given contract to harass the long-term sick

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A4E, advice, allowance, assessment, BBC, bullied, bully, Coalition, Conservative, costs, Democrat, Department, DWP, economic, economy, employer, employment, England, ESA, GP, harass, health, illness, Lib Dem, Liberal, long term, loss, Mike Sivier, mikesivier, money, non compulsory, output, Pensions, people, plan, politics, profit, Scotland, service, sick, support, Tories, Tory, Trades Union Congress, treatment, TUC, Universal Jobmatch, Vox Political, Wales, WCA, welfare to work, work, work capability assessment

The pretext: These are the figures showing the estimated amount of long-term illness in the UK per year. Remember that these figures have halved in the last decade.

The Department for Work and Pensions is setting up a new “service” offering “advice” to people who are off work with an illness for more than four weeks.

No reference is made to improving people’s health.

It should also be noted that sickness absence in the UK is among the lowest in Europe, and has halved over the past decade.

The announcement was made on the BBC News website shortly after midnight. Nothing has appeared on the Government’s own website so it seems the Corporation has gone back to being Westminster’s poodle again – breaking news for the government in order to give spin doctors time to assess the reaction and then write a press release that is more acceptable to the public.

The Health and Work Service will be a privately-run operation covering England, Wales and Scotland, offering “non-compulsory” medical assessments and “treatment plans”. This is reminiscent of the way Universal Jobmatch was introduced to jobseekers as a “non-compulsory” service – which many thousands of people have been bullied and harassed into joining.

The scheme will allow employers or GPs to refer employees for a “work-focused occupational health assessment”, according to the BBC report. So this means the employee has no say in whether to go on the scheme – it is down to bosses and doctors. You are invited to consider whether this represents another great step forward in the Conservative Party’s claims to be crusading for patient choice.

The story says workers will be allowed to refuse assessment or to follow any course of action that is recommended but, again, we have the example of Universal Jobmatch.

The “assessment” is meant to identify the issues preventing an employee from returning to work and draw up a plan for them, their GP and their employer, showing how that person can be “helped” back more quickly.

One is forced to question the efficacy of such a system, if faced with illnesses or diseases that must receive medical treatment.

You don’t talk someone better – the huge number of people who have died while going through the DWP’s Employment and Support Allowance sickness denial machine has proved that.

The government has made its aim in setting up the new scheme perfectly clear, saying employers will “save money” by having fewer staff off sick – possibly saving companies up to £70 million a year in reduced sickness pay and related costs.

The DWP says people will return to work earlier. This seems like a pie-in-the-sky aspiration, as illness does not go away in accordance with a timetable. This means the Department’s other claims – that there will be a reduction in lost working days and increased economic output – are also pipe dreams.

It is far more likely that sick people will be forced back to work before they are better – leading to an increased chance that illnesses will spread among workforces, there will be more lost working days and lowered economic output.

The Trades Union Congress, while supporting schemes that could help people back into work, agreed (with me) that this one creates a danger that people will be forced back to work before they are well.

Finally, any company involved in the scheme should be aware that it is unlikely to make a profit from it. Look at the effect on other firms of involvement with DWP schemes: Welfare-to-work provider A4e has reported a pre-tax loss of £11.5 million in the year to March 31, 2013 – up from a £2.1 million loss the year before. Turnover dropped from £194 million to £167 million.

So now we can say very clearly to all private companies:

Working for the Coalition government doesn’t pay.

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Sink, Britain, Sink! – the cost of privatising water management

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co-operation, co-ordination, commercial, companies, company, competition, cost, council, DEFRA, delay, Department, disease, divert, drain, drought, environment, extraction, farm, firm, flood, food, government, healthcare, house, housing, integrate, land, local authority, Mike Sivier, mikesivier, money, National Health Service, NHS, overcrowding, plain, plan, planning, policy, possessions, private, profit, rain, reservoir, river, rural affairs, sewer, storage, Vox Political, water

– This is a song by a local musician, here in Mid Wales, written during the last serious flooding. I make no apologies for opportunistically linking to it as it says a few choice words about the situation and the government.

“And the rains came down, and the floods came up” – The Wise Man and the Foolish Man (Southern Folk Song).

Some of you may have noticed we’ve had a few spots of wet weather recently. This is nothing new to our island nation.

The trouble is, having fallen on us all, the water hasn’t had the decency to clear off and drain away. Instead, it has built up and up and caused a huge amount of flood damage to land and houses that were not built in a safe place, as in the song lyric quoted above, but in flood plains.

This is a result of bad planning – by water and sewerage companies that have failed to implement successful drainage schemes or to divert floodwater from rivers in order to prevent overflow, and by planning authorities that have allowed housing to be built in the wrong place.

What were they thinking?

My guess is that the water companies were thinking about the money, and planning authorities wanted to ease overcrowding.

We live in a country where management of the water supply went into private hands several decades ago. When that happened, it became impossible to have any kind of integrated plan to deal with the supply of water, droughts, floods and storage. Water supply became a commodity to be bought and sold by rich people according to the golden rules of capitalism: Invest the minimum; charge the maximum.

So reservoirs have been sold off to foreign water companies, meaning we have no adequate response to droughts. None have been built, meaning we have no adequate response to floods. Concerns about river flooding have been neglected. There has not been the investment in extraction and storage of floodwater that repeated incidents over the last few years have demanded.

The government is reducing its budget for handling these issues. Not only that, but it is delaying implementation of a new policy on drainage.

This would be regulated by local authorities, who have responsibility for planning approvals. Some might say these authorities should have had a little more forethought before granting applications to build on flood plains, or for adaptations to existing properties that have prevented water from draining into the soil and sent it down drains instead, to overload the sewer system.

Some of these are matters of necessity: Planning officers may have gone to the limit of what is allowed, in order to allow housing developments that relieve the burden of overcrowding; in other matters, they may have been unable to apply any legal restrictions on applications.

In short, there is no joined-up thinking.

There will be no joined-up thinking in the future, either – unless the situation is changed radically.

Meanwhile, the cost racked up by the damage is huge – in ruined farmland, in ruined homes and possessions, and blighted lives. And what about the risk of disease that floodwater brings with it? The NHS in England is ill-equipped to deal with any outbreaks, being seriously weakened by the government-sponsored incursions of private, cheap-and-simple health firms.

Something has to give beneath the weight of all this floodwater. Change is vital – from commercial competition to co-operation and co-ordination.

Privatisation of water has failed. It’s time to bring it back under public control.

Is anyone opposed?

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Are British workers being lured into health insurance that will never pay out?

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Atos, back, biopsychosocial, British, chronic, Coalition, Department of Social Security, Disability Living Allowance, DLA, Employment and Support Allowance, ESA, fatigue, fibromyalgia, George Engel, government, health, healthcare, IB, illness, Incapacity Benefit, income, insurance, Lyme disease, mental, model, Multiple Sclerosis, nervous, pain, Personal Independence Payment, Peter Lilley, PIP, plan, protection, self-reported, subjective, syndrome, UK, unum, up, WCA, work, work capability assessment

Working people in the UK could be facing a huge drain on their income, if they join an insurance scheme being offered by a discredited American firm.

It seems that the company behind the hated Work Capability Assessment that has denied disability benefits to thousands of genuinely sick and disabled people, has begun a mass-marketing campaign to encourage able-bodied members of the British public to invest in ‘Income Protection Insurance’, and another scheme known as the ‘Back-up Plan’.

This insurance scheme is only available via the workplace, and it is understood that it has been designed to ensure that the company can resist paying out whenever a claim is made.

In other words, if you join the scheme, you will be giving away your money to a criminal firm. If you become ill or suffer disability in the future, you will not receive a single penny of the insurance money that is due to you.

That is the allegation against Unum Insurance, the American giant that has spent more than two decades advising successive British governments on how to avoid paying sickness and disability benefits to the most deserving claimants in our society.

If you have been contacted in the workplace and offered a chance to take out this insurance, please get in touch. Your experience of this system and insights into its operating procedures could be invaluable.

For those who don’t know the Unum story, you can read some of it here. Unum’s bosses devised their current system to combat the rise of ‘subjective’ illnesses such as ‘chronic pain’, ‘chronic fatigue syndrome’, fibromyalgia, multiple sclerosis, Lyme disease.

The solution devised by the bosses was to reduce the number of successful claims it paid out, by aggressively disputing whether the claimant was ill. So the company skewed its medical examinations to its own favour by questioning illnesses that were “self-reported”, labelling some disabling conditions as “psychological”, and playing up the “subjective” nature of “mental” and “nervous” claims.

The acknowledged basis for this attitude is the Biopsychosocial Model of illness, developed by the psychiatrist George Engel – but it’s a bastardised version, removing the bio- and -social aspects and concentrating on the ‘psycho’. This version of the theory, as used by Unum, has been utterly discredited. It is nonsense, totally disregarding such inconvenient medical procedures as diagnosis and prognosis, or limited life expectancy.

But it proved a great success for Unum – so much so that the UK government sought advice from the company in the early 1990s, when Peter Lilley was running the Department of Social Security. He wanted to reduce the number of disability claimants on his books, and Unum was only too happy to help out. It has been at the heart of disability benefit policy ever since.

We have Unum to thank for the Work Capability Assessment (administered by another private firm, Atos – an IT firm that has no expertise in healthcare, even though that word occasionally appears on its company logo). The recommendations made by Atos representatives, following these assessments, have led to the deaths of at least 73 genuinely ill people every week (according to government figures that are now almost a year old), who have claimed Employment and Support Allowance (formerly Incapacity Benefit). The real figure may be much higher.

The Coalition government considers this to be a great achievement and has now begun expanding the Work Capability Assessment regime to cover claims for Disability Living Allowance, now branded the Personal Independence Payment, with criteria that are much more difficult to achieve.

We can all expect many more deaths to arise from this.

Now, it seems, Unum believes the UK is ripe for bleeding – and that is why it is trying to sell its bogus insurance to working people here.

If you have been contacted, please get in touch.

For further information (with annotations pointing to the really damning evidence) see ‘The Hidden Agenda’ by disability researcher Mo Stewart.

Coalition plans are working – some government departments will be “decimated”

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Amazon, Anglian, avoidance, Chancellor, Coalition, Conservative, cut, debt, deficit, Department, economy, econoshambles, election, gas, George Osborne, Google, government, haven, Mike Sivier, mikesivier, Parliament, plan, politics, recession, round, Social Market Foundation, spending, Starbucks, structural, tax, Thames, The Guardian, thinktank, Tories, Tory, Vox Political, water, Yorkshire

I know I used this photo very recently, but it’s the only one I feel really gets across the CHARACTER of our vampiric Chancellor.

Oh look, Gideon George Osborne’s an idiot again. Or a genius, depending on whether you’re a fan of responsible government or of shrinking the State.

He’s going to cut government spending by £48 BILLION in the next government spending round (The Guardian says he could increase taxes by that amount but I think we all know that’s not going to happen. Not to the rich, anyway).

It turns out the economy is weaker now than when he started – no surprises there, that’s what his policies were intended to do – so he’ll have a bigger gap to bridge when he makes his next set of multi-year spending plans. Let’s bear in mind that there will be an election around this time; we can boot this bunch of economically-illiterate lunatics back out to rot in their country estates and get someone in who actually wants to do some good.

Assuming that doesn’t happen, according to The Grauniad, in addition to the deep cuts in government departmental spending for 2010-15, Mr 0 pencilled in £26 billion of additional cuts for the next spending round “to complete” – don’t laugh – “the repair work”. Obviously “repair” was a space-holding word and they were looking for an appropriate one. “Demolition” seems a likely contender to me.

It turns out the UK’s structural deficit – that’s the shortfall in the public finances that will remain when the economy has fully recovered from the recession, as they love to remind us – was 1.1 per cent of GDP higher than forecast in March. So that wipes out the one per cent growth we had in the last quarter, then. Harumph.

This means that the current spending round’s cuts of 2.3 per cent will be dwarfed by the 3.7 per cent further cuts required in the next one – so everything is going to plan, you see.

The paper quotes Ian Mulheirn, director of the Social Market Foundation thinktank, as saying: “The chancellor will have to lay out some eye-watering cuts at the next spending review and will prolong austerity deep into the next Parliament.” Eye-watering to you, sir – MOUTH-watering to him.

For those of us who know we’re going to have to pay for it (some of the poorest with their lives, I’m sure. It’s already happened in this Parliament; if the Conservatives continue into the next, it’ll only get worse) also know that it could be very different.

This government has overseen and facilitated some of the worst tax avoidance fiascos in the history of, well, taxation itself, I expect. Look at the article I posted yesterday about the water companies. Look at Starbucks, Google, and Amazon, that are all having to explain themselves because they are companies owned by Johnny Foreigner. It’s all right for British businesspeople to stash your cash in tax havens abroad, but we can’t let just anyone have it, can we?

Come to that, look at how gas prices are allegedly being manipulated for their own ends by the big power companies, which is the lead on The Guardian‘s website as I type this. That market is worth £300 billion, according to the paper. How much of that does the State get, and how much disappears?

If I hear one more overprivileged bozo telling me it’s what the law allows I shall retch in my – in HIS – hat. The law allows it because the laws are being MADE by an overprivileged bozo – Gideon George Osborne!

Econoshambles.

“Tax the rich” says Clegg – in search of the ‘poor’ vote?

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allowance, backbench, borrowing, budget, Coalition, Conservative, cut, David Cameron, David Laws, Deputy, economy, failed, George Osborne, income, Income Tax, jail, Liberal Democrat, low, middle, morally bankrupt, Nick Clegg, opinion poll, Parliamentary, plan, Prime Minister, privilege, rich, Tories, Tory, turnaround

Nick Clegg seems to have had a change of heart.

In a Guardian interview (quoted by the BBC) he has called for a “time limited contribution” from the richest in society beyond his party’s current policy for a mansion tax – taxes on properties above a certain value.

This is a departure for the Deputy Prime Minister who voted solidly for the millionaires’ income tax cut (from 50 per cent to 45 per cent) in George Osborne’s most recent attempt at a Budget.

Some might say that the turnaround is genuine, that Mr Clegg has rethought his position and, in light of the Coalition’s failing economic plan – which has put government borrowing up by a quarter so far this year – admitted that the Tory plan, to cut public services to the bone and tax the poor for the remainder, simply won’t make the grade.

But then we see that, in the same interview, Mr Clegg said he wants to see the return of David Laws to a cabinet position. Laws quit after having to admit he had claimed £40,000 in Parliamentary allowances to pay his partner’s rent. He spent 18 months on the backbenches. If you or I were to overclaim £40,000 in housing benefit, we would be jailed for six months.

So you can see that Mr Clegg is still a big fan of privilege and the principle that, when you’re in power, you change conditions to help your friends.

That’s why I say: Don’t be fooled by this man. He’s seen the state of the opinion polls; he knows his party could be cut down to a maximum of 10 MPs in 2015, and he wants to stop that from happening. That’s why he’s appealing for the sympathy of those of us on low or middle incomes. He wants us to believe that he identifies with us against the rich. In fact, he’s banking on it, even though he himself is a rich man from a privileged background.

What a morally bankrupt attitude (as I’m sure David Cameron might describe it, since he’s fond of that phrase).