Despite the news that the budgetary shortfall is less than expected, the government is accelerating its attack on Britain…
The post-election choreography that has occurred over the past month is revealing. Suddenly rather than adopting a graduated approach spread over four years, the notion of immediately slashing public sector expenditure is considered to be a sound government policy.
The timing of this slash and burn agenda has coincided with credit ratings agencies such as Fitch issuing well publicised “independent” investigations into Britain’s finances, giving support to an immediate attack.
Nevertheless, this shock and awe choreography became stretched just before the 22 June budget when the actual shortfall between government expenditure and revenue for the year ending 5 April 2010 came in at £152 billion. This is £22 billion lower than the estimated £174 billion deficit that had been headlined across newspapers since October 2009, something the government tried to brush aside.
Debt and deficit
Remember that deficits are only estimated budgetary shortfalls at a point in time. Nevertheless the term debt (which is a definite sum of money owed) and deficit (which is a projection) are often portrayed as meaning the same thing. Similar debt/deficit muddling is also part of the technique used when attacking final salary pension schemes.
When the £22 billion improvement became known, the government immediately smothered the news by stating that Britain’s finances are actually worse than previously thought. Even the Treasury’s new Office for Budget Responsibility struggled to support the Government on that one, but still helpfully managed to tinker with some future growth assumptions to give the Osborne budgetary message credibility.
Fake independence
Of course the Office for Budget Responsibility is another of those fake “independent” bodies that have just been set up. It is chaired by that useful idiot Alan Budd, who was the economist of choice for both Nigel Lawson and Norman Lamont when they were chancellors in the 1980s and early 1990s.
Obviously all this budgetary posturing by the government is designed to weaken working class resolve, but the important point to make in terms of political economy is that this is not a 1979 moment. For example it is now begrudgingly acknowledged that Britain’s position would be far worse had we joined the euro. The fact that we are not in the euro is entirely down to the working class and we should use this as part of our drive to bring about working class ascendancy.
Labour, Tory, Liberal, SNP and any other parliamentary rubbish would all have liked to have pushed us into joining the euro. They and their chattering experts were wrong and the working class was right, so why on earth now listen to any of their nonsense? They have just one policy and that is “make the working class pay”.
To illustrate how threadbare this approach has become, when asked why public finances have been landed with the £130 billion cost of shoring up bank balances, a Treasury spokesman said that supporting banks this way rather than consolidating them into just one British bank, maintains consumer choice. How lame.
In the circumstances it is down to the working class to move forward with the intention of taking control at the first opportunity. Our current debt is just over £900 billion, while our savings including invested pension assets are double that amount.
So rather than waste our savings supporting future government debt and foreign creditors in the manner that they have planned, we must use our capital to develop a self-reliant industrial economy completely outside of the EU, with a preparedness to trade throughout the world. We may then happily deal with Britain’s creditors but we will never become their slaves.