Britain is much worse off than statistics claim and our vapid bimbo-media lead Part of that lazy thinking that inspires journalists to keep speaking of “the government” spending money on this or that, as if “the government” were somehow sitting on an infinitely large pile of “government money” that most of the time it was unreasonably withholding from worthy causes. This money essentially comes from the people. Further lazy right-wing thinking then starts to say we must rely on a healthy private sector and treats tax as an evil. We need deeper thinking than this.
Before getting to the depths, one needs to understand we are being lied to and that a big confidence trick is taking place. The reason our economy is knackered is not because successive governments have indeed pandered to subjective worthy causes with money that those governments did not possess. Stuff like hospitals and the rest of the public sector arise because the private sector is crap. Otherwise Mr. Plod and surgeons would be working for it. We will be paying bill. It is not government money because the government doesn’t have any. It has liabilities only. It is taxpayers’ money. Yet we would be spending the money to “private landlords” otherwise.
The only achievement to date of the UK’s coalition government has been a triumph of PR – hardly surprising given that PR appears to comprise the only work experience Cameron has ever had outside politics. Our ignorant media is complicit with the line that the British government has started to deal with the grotesque debt inherited from the previous government. Yet government spending was actually higher for the fiscal year 2010/11 than under the last year of the hapless and reviled Nulabour.
The UK debt figures are also much worse than conventionally believed because 2011 debt including “interventions” stood at about £2,270 billion as at September 2011, or 150% of UK GDP. To this we should add public sector pensions (£1,100bn+), PFI (£400bn+) and sundry other off-balance-sheet obligations of the state. The bleak real summary is that after five years of supposed austerity, UK government spending will be back to 2005 levels… but with twice as much debt.
There has been no real austerity yet in the UK, unless you’ve lost your job or benefits, or seen your pension halved. There has been no real deleveraging in the global economy at an aggregate level either. Global credit market debt stands at $220 trillion, having grown by 11% annually since 2002, versus 8% nominal GDP growth (and no one really believes this nominal figure).
I understand people wanting government off their backs, but is the public sector really the great drag or is it really a highly inefficient private sector that is the problem? Nothing is more private sector than the banks. We’re in much deeper than we’re being told and part of this is the expectation that the private sector is just waiting for the opportunity to bring about a rally.
If the problem is the public sector we seem doomed the the privatisation of health, education, policing and the rest. There is no evidence this is a good thing. Drivel about private sector efficiency isn’t going to help us. The actual system is that the government is lying about how bad it is and using the clapped-out private sector cavalry bullshit. Nothing has been done for 4 years now except extend and pretend in the hope of a windfall from “growth”.
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