Only 10% Cut So Far and still in Recession

It’s not good is it? Officially back into the recession that we’ve barely left for two years, despite the Con?Dems austerity program. A program I might add that has so far only implemented just 10% of their planned cuts to expenditure.

This government, with no real mandate from the people is the most vicious I can ever recall, yes, worse even than Margaret Thatcher and particularly bad because they are utterly incompetent, arrogant, out of touch with reality and unable to listen. They were warned, not just by me and assorted other bloggers, but by many financial experts, that their plans pointed towards disaster. Not of course, disaster for them personally as most are millionaires well cushioned with their tax havens and trust funds but disaster for countless citizens of our lands.

Unemployment and fear thereof in the millions and rising including huge numbers of our young people who now may never get a job, hospital waiting lists getting longer, home repossessions on the increase and poorer tenants being compulsory moved from London and South East to the North, leading towards a North/South divide like never before. Thatcher left little public assets untouched but now even the jewel in the crown, our NHS, is being sold off for private profit along with our schools. It didn’t take a genius to predict all this would happen so it has to be assumed that these are deliberate policies conjured up for the sole benefit of those who have manipulated themselves into power.

The current situation tends to lead the electorate into a depressed condition whereby apathy takes over along with a feeling of individual isolation which in turn leads to a sense of powerlessness. We are not though powerless if we collectively recognise that the power is ours and we can take it back from those to whom we unwittingly lent it. We can demand change and change we will get but only if we work together for the benefit of us all. We must remind those who say they can’t be bothered with politics that politics is health, employment, education, social services, the cost of fuel, pensions or whether your sons or daughters are going to war.

Osborne : Liar or Cheat?

Questioned on BBC’s Today programme George Osborne was asked if he would personally benefit from the tax changes on the wealthy he replied that he would be unaffected and implied that he gets less than the £150,000 per year.

According to the best information I can find he has a personal fortune of £4 million. Now either he is lying to the nation or he has engaged in extensive tax evasion or tax avoidance schemes that he is supposedly against. So it would seem that we have as Chancellor of the Exchequer either a liar or a cheat running the finances of our country; surely he should be made to explain himself or better still resign.

Twenty two of the twenty nine cabinet ministers are millionaires so to expect fairness, equality and help for the less well off would be like expecting turkeys to vote for Christmas. Wake up Britain, rise up Britain, we deserve better than this. We need to pay off our debt; not the notional paper monetary debt, because almost every country in the World is in reality bankrupt but the debt of fairness and equality that we owe to ourselves, our children, our grandchildren and generations yet unborn.

Choices

Let’s face it this country is in a mess! It’s like a ship in a raging storm heading towards rocks and the captain shouts “Hold this course!” His Lieutenant who hopes one day to become captain shouts “Hold this course but slow down a bit.” The little cabin boy can see the rocks but feeling helpless crawls into  his hammock and puts his hands over his eyes and cotton wool in his ears, holding on to a blind trust in the madness of the officers because to do otherwise would require him to DO something.

The UK, along with other Western nations, owes money, a lot of money and so it was rightly decided to reduce this debt and this is where our witless leadership went wrong. They had no one with vision or moral integrity and so they set about taking money from those who had little, those without, they believe, power, attacking the sick, the pensioners, students, the lower paid workers who actually produce the wealth that makes us the 6th richest nation on Earth. They chose not to rein in the bankers and financial directors, they chose not to go after those who avoid paying their proper share of taxation amounting to tens of billions each year because they themselves belong to, or aspire to belong, to that elite band. They chose not to save up to £200billion by cancelling the Trident nuclear weapon system which will never be used and deters no one simply because this would deprive them of a seat at the top table of the United Nations. Instead of strutting they may have to walk like the rest of humankind.

They chose not to invest in a massive social housing programme that is desperately needed for millions of our citizens and would create and safeguard hundreds of thousands of jobs. In it’s wake this would generate spending power for the workers thus creating more employment and in addition, tax revenues. A bi product would also be a likely reduction in ever increasing housing rental costs which (some) greedy landlords are reaping in such places as London where tenants are now to be evicted because of government cuts to housing benefit. Instead they chose borrowing even more to fund rapidly increasing unemployment which is a tried and tested method of keeping wage increases to a minimum. Not such a surprising choice either when many of those currently in power like Chris Grayling, are indeed wealthy property owners.

We too though have choices. Even in this poor democracy of ours we do not have to be like the cabin boy; the power ‘they’ hold is in reality, our power that we lend to them. They stick together but they are only a few, we are millions and if only we can stick together and demand a new way, a new vision, then we can take back our power and steer our ship away from the rocks, into calmer waters of fairness, justice, democracy, co-operation and peace.

But have we the guts?

HM Department of Loan Sharks

The Dept of Work & Pensions under Iain Duncan Smith (IDS) is today announcing a loan ‘service’ for the poor and vulnerable in our society. (Let’s ignore for a moment whether in the 21st Century there should still ‘poor & vulnerable and that an earlier Tory had said ‘there is no such thing as Society’)

This scheme called My Home Finance is supposed to protect people who are in dire straits from the clutches of loan sharks who charge exorbitant rates of interest often backed up with threats of violence.  From this perspective it’s a good idea. The scheme though, when rolled out nationwide, will be charging 49.9% interest! At a time when the Bank of England Rate is 0.5% and credit card companies are offering around 12% and Credit Unions are prohibited by law from charging more than 26.8% but usually charge less, I would call this Government scheme Loan Sharking.

If further proof were needed that this Con/Dem coalition is intent on fleecing the poor to pay for the capitalist excesses you must be very difficult to convince.

British Slaves

Tonight is the last night of the ‘Proms’ the British series of concerts held in the Albert Hall. The ‘highlight’ of the evening for most, is, for me, a sickening spectacle of nationalistic fervour  with a rendition of ‘Rule Britannia’ including the phrase ‘Britons never, never, never, shall be slaves’.

The sad truth of course, is that Britons are well and truly slaves; slaves to their capitalist masters. Britons are now working longer than our Middle Ages forebears, most are trapped with large mortgages around their necks, too afraid to offer more than token resistance to the high stress lifestyle imposed upon them.

It can be argued that they have simply allowed this to happen seduced by clever political and consumerist marketing and this would be true but let us not underestimate the powerful forces that have been at work over the past few decades. I am though hopeful that the impending full frontal attack on the hopes and dreams of Britons by this current consortium of a power hungry and greedy government will bring the people to their senses and they will demand a different and a better way to organise society. I believe or should I say, I hope, they will take back the power that has been usurped and is rightfully theirs, that they will reorganise through the Trade Unions, that they will demonstrate and rebuild a Labour Party that is truly a party of the people once again.

This is my ‘hopes and dreams’ and I will allow no government to take that from me.

Bosses Back Tories – Now There’s a Surprise!

The bosses, all of them on over a £1million salaries, of some of the UK’s big businesses back the Tory plan to cut the increase in National Insurance contributions, calling it a ‘Tax on jobs’.

Well it is a tax on jobs or rather, a tax on each person employed but let us put it in perspective for goodness sake. It amounts in most cases to less than a fiver per week per employee and if a company paying out over £20,000 per worker can’t afford an extra fiver then either that company is in deep doo doo and unlikely to survive anyway or they fear having to cut down on executives bonuses or a tiny reduction in shareholders dividends. Either way it’s no reason to cut this small increase in order to help pay off our national debt and help to maintain our public services.

By the way, these business leaders are probably made up of the same leaders who squealed in 1997 at the very mention of a National Minimum Wage, crying that it was a ‘tax on jobs’ and would bring about the downfall of the whole economy. It didn’t though, did it?

Poverty… Why?

A report out recently shows that the gap between the richest in Britain and the poorest has widened. I can’t say that it surprised me. In the usual and expected politician double speak Gordon Brown said “The report illustrates starkly that despite a levelling-off of inequality in the last decade we still have much further to go.” No Gordon, it didn’t say a ‘levelling off’ it said ‘widened’. We have indeed got further to go, in fact we actually need to make a start.

Those that know me often say that I lay the blame for almost all of the ills in this country at the feet of Margaret Thatcher, including this severe winter. Well, she did waste the windfall of North Sea oil and closed down 300 years supply of coal but that’s another story. What Thatcher did, very cleverly, was to break the strength of the Trade Unions and at the same time make the working population believe that this was a good thing. She then set about selling off most of our publicly owned assets such as our gas (remember ‘Tell Sid?), electricity, water and railways. She knew perfectly well that shares would largely end up with the financial institutions but fooled many into believing that they were ‘part of a share holding democracy’. Above all she put the notion of individualism, get what you can for yourself and the devil take the hindmost into the national psyche.  In 1997 the nation with a collective sigh of relief elected New Labour with most not realising that Tony Blair was but a toned down Thatcher with a smiling face. The result being that the inequality gap has widened still further.

The Labour Party was originally brought into being by the Trade Unions to fight for the rights of it’s members and to bring about a more equal and fair society and forced through enormous benefits, the National Health Service being just one example. The (New) Labour Party of today has morphed into just another wing of the capitalist system that lies at the root of all our ills. The budget of yesterday, despite the crying need to balance the books, made it easier to buy a house and saddle the working population with a life long mortgage around their necks and thus restricting their ability to dissent.  In addition this reliance on house prices ever increasing, played a large part in the recent economic crash and yet the Chancellor encourages more of the same.

So is it ‘Time for Change’ and bring back the Tories? Definitely not, New Labour is still the lessor of the evils but an evil non-the-less and although it’s perhaps worth voting for Lib Dems where they have a chance, real change will only come about when the people accept the hardest thing of all and realise that they have been duped for several generations and rise up with one voice and demand a new way.

Robin Hood Tax

So simple, together we could make it happen. Oh and ignore the 6,000 odd votes against as most were generated automatically by Goldman Sachs the greedy bankers. Robin Hood Tax.

A Nation of Sheep

The energy Regulator Ofgem has called on the suppliers to reduce their charges to customers following recent lower costs. Unsurprisingly they have refused. All of them are using similar arguments about uncertainty and ‘other costs’ in an attempt to justify making an average extra profit this year from each customer of £60 per year, compared with the last three years. It sounds very much to me like an energy cartel.

This is what happens when government privatises what is a natural public resource. The companies obviously work together (if proven it would be illegal) to keep profits for shareholders up and customers become a poor second and with competition a myth. The old Water Boards were also sold off, water for Christ’s sake, the essential for life, sold off for profit. British Rail which wasn’t a bad service at all, sold off for profit. If BR had the same public funds put into it as the private companies receive now from the State, it would be better and more importantly perhaps, cheaper to use.

The gullible people just sat back and let it all happen, some tempted by the carrot of cheap share offers that soon ended up in the hands of the big investors. Still they sit on their hands while chunks of our health and education are handed over for profit.

Here We Go Again!

The housing market is on the move again of that there is little doubt and of course along with it the cost of buying a home is rising albeit slowly at the present time. The highest level of unemployment in my region stands at 6% which of course is not much fun for those without work but it does mean that 94% have jobs. Car production is rising once more and bankers bonus payouts are still obscene.

All this does not mean that the recession is over but points to it at least bottoming out. The massive bill to stave off the worst of the global economy crash will still have to be paid over the next couple of decades and will have some negative impact on most of us. Most of us being the ones who played no part in the disgraceful financial gambling of the past ten to twenty years although most of us were a part of the rampant consumerism that gripped the developed world.

A few minor inconveniences have been put in place to curb some of the excesses of the financial traders but by and large as the recovery gets under way it will be business as usual and so setting us up for a repeat performance in another decade or so down the line. Bankers will be making fortunes out of the future labour of ordinary people not even born yet, houses will be purchased as investments and not as homes to live in, industry will again expand and add to the climatic pollution that is already out of control.

This global catastrophe presented the World and I suggest, the UK in particular, with a golden opportunity for change. That chance has already been squandered and we are doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past and the next time may not contain within it opportunity for change.