Day 3550: Freak Schools

Monday:



The BIG controversy of the week – at least according to the meeja – was the policy motion saying: "We think Free Schools stink". I paraphrase. A bit.

Having made ONE speech (collecting MY Blogger of the Year Prize) and then gotten his face on the telly asking Captain Clegg a question ("do you agree with Vince"; pitch him a HARD one why don't you) my normally shy Daddy Richard seems to have gone a bit CRAZED for the limelight and submitted a speaker's card.

To make matters even WORSE, he thought he have a go a speaking AGAINST!

Don't panic, this wasn't Coalition-loyalty gone MAD; it was the USUAL reason for attacking a policy at Lib Dem Conference: it wasn't Liberal ENOUGH!

The central thrust of the motion was contained in lines 16 and 17 which say:

In relation to 'free schools', conference calls on all Liberal Democrats to urge people not to take up this option…

and then go on to list all the BAD things that might be a RISK if Free Schools go ahead.

Basically an instruction to all Liberal Democrats, but especially those in local authorities, to scupper the implementation of the Coalition policy. i.e. it's fine to have Free Schools on the statute book so long as we don't let anyone ever USE them.

(Incidentally, Mr Evan was a LITTLE bit naughty in his remark that this was "just" "calling on" people to do this as if this was merely a suggestion, when he knows perfectly well that "calls on" is conference language for "conference says you WILL do this", not "conference says you might like to do this". Having said that, I suspect most Liberal Democrat ministers will use exactly that loophole to totally ignore the motion.)

The second of two amendments submitted was clearly aimed at substantially watering down this main thrust, starting by deleting those powerful lines 16 and 17 and all that followed, and although it restated the risks more clearly, it replaced that command with a softer:

urges Liberal Democrat Parliamentarians to work within government

which is both less vocative and rather more touchy-feely Coalition compromise-ive.


The first amendment, by the way, was to add a further RISK to the table of BAD THINGS that Free Schools might cause, namely a risk of increasing RELIGIOUS divisions, clearly for people worried about Faith Schools


There were more than seventy cards put in and so Daddy's was NOT one of the ones called, but here's what he WOULD have said:

Conference, I'm wary of this free schools idea. I'm sure we all are.

But I don't think this motion makes a clear case for why we should be wary or what we should do about it.


Are we wary because it's the Tories?

We all know Free Schools are a Tory totem, something to flourish at their voters, maybe even more importantly at their backbenchers, rushed through the House because, well, because the Tories didn't actually have so many policies and free school were a big visible marker to announce they had arrived

But are we using this motion just to prove we're different? Because that's gesture politics. And I'd like to make that gesture to the Tories too, but it's not a good enough reason for making policy.


Are we wary because of our principles?

Because if we are the motion doesn't say so.

I'm right there with Freedom from Ignorance, but I want us to remember Freedom from Conformity too. We don't know all the answers and I'd rather we put our efforts into making sure resources go to those who need them than stopping other people from trying something new that might work better.


Are we wary because we're too used to used to running local government and this takes us out of our comfort zone?

We are the party of handing power back to people and Conference Free Schools does hand power back to people. If we want to be about giving power away it means giving our power away too.


Are we wary because of the money? Because this as the motion says risks:

"Creating surplus places which is prejudicial to efficient use of resources in a time of austerity"

That's a good reason right now. But alarm bells start to ring. It sounds like we don't just mean for now, but for always.

And I don't agree with that.

I don't think it is wrong to create a surplus of places, and I object to the idea we should be placing the emphasis on efficiency.

When I think of education, I want to think of opportunity first, not efficiency

Conference, efficiency is the enemy of choice.

A perfectly efficient system has exactly as many places as there are pupils and no choices at all.

If you want pupils to have genuine choices, you are going to have to have some surplus places.

I think with this motion we're in danger of missing the point. What is wrong with free schools is not that they create surplus places, but that they risk creating surplus places for people who already have plenty of choice.


Like the movers of amendment one, I'm suspicious of faith schools and the possibility of increasing social divisions.

But I don't think the answer is to reduce parents options.

I think that people end up sending their kids to faith schools because they have too few choices, not because they have too many.

Conference, I wish I could recommend the much better-drafted amendment two, but it contains the same problem, the same emphasis on efficiency not choice, so I'm going to say I'm against the motion.

We don't need to make this Tory policy a whipping boy to prove we are different. We're better than that. So, let's go back and come up with a better Liberal critique so we can make Free Schools into Schools of Opportunity!

Anyway, in spite of Daddy's dramatic NON-INTERVENTION, the motion was passed by a huge majority (amended with the FIRST amendment on Faith Schools, but not the SECOND amendment that watered it down).


Now, you may very well think that that is a silly thing to do, passing motions that won't really change anything, but of course is DOES change something: it changes the way that the Liberal Democrat conference members felt about THEMSELVES.

When we all arrived in Liverpool we were all, quite separately, worrying away about what the Coalition really MEANT. All of us, every single one, were pretty sure that WE were still Liberal Democrats, but what about everyone else? Was it TRUE what the Hard Labour chorus have been hooting all summer about us being ABSORBED by the Conservatories? Would we find ourselves alone among a breed of POD PEOPLE?

Getting to Conference, the first thing that happened was that we all SHARED these worries; but the SECOND thing that happened was that we all CARRIED ON BEHAVING LIKE LIBERAL DEMOCRATS.

Passing the motion opposing Mr Borogrove's silly policy was a way for us to come together and say "we are STILL the Party of Liberal Democracy".

And that is why, or ONE of the reasons why, by the END of the week, the Party was feeling much better about itself.

PS:

Yes, of COURSE Daddy Alex wrote the speech for Daddy Richard – or "script edited" it as he insists; you don't think Daddy Richard can WRITE, do you?
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Day 3555: Curse-ed*

Saturday:


Beware the CURSE of the BOTYs they say**. Auntie Alix went quiet; Lady Deputy Councillor Stephen was silenced; Wicked Uncle Costigan vanished without trace; even Mr Jumbo Graham was never heard of again… unless you read his Quaequam Blog…

Well, I'm a Militant Atheist Baby Elephant and I don't believe in curses!

I TWEAK the nose of the SPINDLY KILLER-FISH… and then run away and let DADDY deal with it!

Besides, if Scooby Doo is right about these things, then it's probably just Auntie Helen in the Old Abandoned Mine-Shaft with some LUMINOUS PAINT and a Count Packula FRIGHT-WIG!***


Where IS Daddy anyway?

Uh oh!

Right, up with this I will not fluffily put! Besides, I need Daddy to avoid rubbish sentences like that last one!

Paging Cuddly Cthulhu!

[fhtagn]

That is not dead which can eternal lie,

And with strange aeons even the Curse of the BOTYs may die

[/fhtagn]

Oh look, there's Daddy, under that enormous pile of Fringe Flyers that the idiots brought back from conference. Get up Daddy, we've got proper WORK to do!

OK Bloggers… I'M BACK!





*no, no, nothing to do with the soon-to-be-annunciated front-runner in the Labour Loser competition.

**or at least snigger about because it DOES sound a bit RUDE!

***Because, let's face it, she does do EVERYTHING ELSE for us, doesn't she!

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Day 3548: It should have been ME... and it was!!!

Saturday:


Well, adjectives escape me, this came as something of a surprise, but it turns out that I am Liberal Democrat Blogger of the Year.

And I have the coaster to prove it. No really, it's cut from rare crystal Libroleum and is worth more than words can say.

Prescious Thing

Once they'd picked him up off the floor, they made Daddy Richard make a speach. Here're his words in full:

wibble, wibble, wibble, wibble, wibble

So let ME say, big thank you hugs to the judges for voting for me and to all the other nonimees for being such good sports and most especially to Auntie Helen for doing all the work that makes the Blog of the Year awards happen.

Only the Liberal Democrats could get into government after ninety years... and choose a soft toy as their best blogger of the year.

I'm actually a bit chuffed. Thank you.

Day 3547: The Elephant in the Cabinet Room

Frinday:

At last! Now I really AM in Government!

Uh oh, here comes the BOSS, better look BUSY!

Now THIS is how to run the country!

ACTUALLY, we're here for a BLOGGER'S INTERVIEW, along with awesome Auntie Helen, fearsome (just kidding) Auntie Linda and Best New Blogger nonimees Ms Charlotte and Mr Nick (no, another one!):

Liberal Democrats mean open Government

More, as they say, on this story later...
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Day 3545: I Like To Ride My Economic Cycle

Wednesday:



and, er



again!


First, I keep meaning to say: economics is more ART than SCIENCE, like History with CALCULATORS.

Don't just take MY fluffy word. There ARE other opinions. They say ask TWO economists and you'll get THREE contradictory answers; or an economist is a man who can pick a fight in an empty room (especially if he's Mr Frown).

But, Ms Jane asks:

Can you explain what you mean by balancing the budget over an economic cycle? How do you know how long the cycle will last in order to do that?

That's a TRICKY ONE, but I'll have a go!


If you look at economic measures of how well the country is doing, GDP is the usual one, you will see a generally rising trend that we call GROWTH but with zigzag-y up and down waves: not QUITE your smooth S-shaped sine-wave, but still with noticeable peaks and troughs where the economy grows faster and then slower, or sometimes even shrinks (which is obviously a recession). If it's a really STEEP downward "zag" then that's what we call a crash!



One "economic cycle" is the time from the top of one peak to the top of the next peak, or from the bottom of one crash to the bottom of the next crash, usually something like every six or seven years.

Recent economic cycles have been marked by: the Oil Shock (1973); the Early Eighties Recession (1980/81); the Lawson "blip" (1987); the House-price Crash that finished in Black Wednesday (1992); the dot.com collapse (2000); and the Credit Crunch (2007/08/09).

(Funnily enough we seem to remember the crashes more than the peaks – just like people remember famous WARS rather than famous PEACES. Isn't it nice to be in the SIXTY-YEARS PEACE.)

But no one is really sure how long "a cycle" is or really when they start and stop or even necessarily whereabouts we ARE in the cycle.

Before you ask how can that be, I'll point out that there's a lot of TIME-LAG before we get these figures. We can get a rough estimate of the previous quarter's growth, but it's very CRUDE, and those figures get revised all the time. It's often a year or two before you get a reasonable GDP figure, and it can be up to six years before you're certain of your final tax take.

So although we can look back with the benefit of HINDSIGHT and know where we WERE, it's much harder to know where we ARE.

Mr Frown used this uncertainty to his advantage to keep moving the goalposts on his "golden rule" (that's the "don't borrow more than you pay back over the economic cycle" rule).

Essentially, if you care, he paid back a HUGE amount of money between 1997 and 1999 (paid for by raiding pensions, windfall taxing the utilities and flogging the 3G licences for a fortune) which is REALLY the last economic cycle (or last-but-one now, probably) and then kept insisting that "ooh no, that economic cycle hadn't ended yet" and so he could still count that big repayment against further borrowing. Which is basically CHEATING.

What the Golden Rule SHOULD mean is that if you are in a trough you can borrow more than you earn to tide you over, but if you are on a peak you should be paying back what you borrowed.

Our best guess is that at the moment we are on the upward curve starting to come out of a particularly deep and nasty trough.

In the Keynesian scheme of things, we should still be borrowing more than we earn this year but starting to narrow that gap with a view to, maybe in two to three years, balancing the budget and then running surpluses for the next part of the cycle… and I bet you can see the problem already.

The Coalition ISN'T planning on running budget surpluses in two to three years time; the deficit is SO HUGE that the Coalition's plans are to try to balance the budget in about five years… just in time for the next trough in the cycle!

(And if you think THAT'S bad, remember that even the non-insane/non-Bully Balls bits of Hard Labour were only planning on halving the deficit in that time and would almost certainly definitely have run into the next downturn before they could recover from the last one!)

HOWEVER that's all in the Keynesian scheme – that is if Mr Milton Keynes was driving the economy.

But Mr Milton Keynes is NOT driving the economy, and more importantly HAS NOT BEEN driving the economy for some time.


That "borrowing more than you earn" is called a CYCLICAL deficit and it's sort of okay, at least in Keynesian economics, so long as you really do pay it all back again.

Unfortunately Mr Frown DIDN'T pay it down again and that's why we're actually playing a DIFFERENT game which is called: "get rid of the STRUCTURAL DEFICIT before we even begin to worry about the CYCLICAL one".

A STRUCTURAL deficit is "what the deficit would be if you took the CYCLICAL deficit/surplus away". That is, if you could pretend that the GDP curve really WAS smooth, without the zigzags, then any difference between what you raise in tax and what you spend would be the real underlying or "STRUCTURAL" deficit.

Running a STRUCTURAL deficit means that there are ALWAYS things that you have to borrow in order to pay for. Even in the GOOD years, when your cyclical SURPLUS might hide your structural DEFICIT – i.e. it LOOKS as though you are repaying more than you borrow – it still means that you aren't repaying ENOUGH to pay back all that you borrowed in the last trough. It means that in the long term your debts inevitably go up and up and up. And that's impossible, so you go BANKRUPT.

Eventually, SOMEONE has to repay the debts you've run up.

That's why that sort of borrowing is NOT an "investment". That sort of borrowing is stealing from the future.

You're not robbing Peter to pay Paul; you're robbing Paul's KIDS to pay Paul. Maybe Paul is okay with that, but we're NOT.

(Oh, and to anyone who says: but France and Germany and Japan all have higher debt-to-GDP ratios than we do – where that debt-to-GDP ratios is how much they owe compared to how much they earn; like the way banks used to let you borrow up to three times your salary – I say to them: would you jump off a CLIFF because France and Germany and Japan have all jumped off A HIGHER CLIFF? Thought not.)


So… it all seems pretty obvious: eliminate any structural deficit and then use the Golden Rule as best you can to negotiate the peaks and troughs.

Only it's never going to be that simple. Of course not. Economists cannot agree which bit of the deficit is structural and which bit is cyclical. And even if they could, they cannot agree where in the cycle we ARE, so they STILL can't tell which bit is which.

So here is my RULE OF THUMB: if your growth this year is better than your growth last year, you should be SHRINKING your DEFICIT or GROWING your SURPLUS; if your growth this year is WORSE than your growth last year you should be SHRINKING your SURPLUS or GROWING your DEFICIT.

This, at least, is what we are doing.

Of course, as a fluffy elephant, I don't HAVE thumbs…

It was all a lot easier when we just did CLASSICAL economics which just said: "balance the budget or you go broke".

I guess we'll just have to WING IT and hope the next downturn doesn't come until after (a) the next General Election or (b) Master Gideon gets out of short trousers.
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Day 3544: The Unions Don't Have to be Our Enemies – part two, a World of Pain

Tuesday:


Why do middle-class teenage "rebels" and Union Barons (not to mention psychopaths like Uncl' Jo Stalin) all love Mr Marx (Karl, not Groucho; you know, the comedian not the philosopher)?

I'll tell you: it's that GINORMOUS loophole "the dictatorship of the proletariat" where the "intellectual" elite get to patronise the "ignorant" workers into doing their old jobs but for their new masters.

It's GREAT if you like lots of personal privilege and bunch of saps to enforce it for you.

Anyway, where was I?

Oh yes, whyever would a Union leader like Mr Mark Swarovski be deceitful about cuts?



One after the other we've had the Unions (or equivalent), the representatives of their VESTED INTERESTS lining up to unsubtly warn us of the dangers of cutting THEIR particular carriage on the gravy train.

First we've had the Heads of the Armed Forces (yes, THEY'RE a UNION too) with dire predictions of unpredictable threats unless the navy gets its two aircraft carriers (HMS Tony and HMS Cherie, I believe they used to be called), and the airforce gets a hundred million pounds worth of joint strike fighters to fly off them so that they can cover the army wherever we happen to invade be defending next. Or in twenty-five years.

Now we get the unions threatening civil disobedience and poll-tax riots. Are they REALLY expecting the mob to fill Trafalgar Square demanding to pay MORE taxes?

Mr Bob "Scare" Crow of the RMS (Really Mean Service) Union has already been out on a "one day" tube strike (I say "one day" because somehow the disruption manages to cover the day either side as well) allegedly "justified" on the grounds of safety (I say "justified" because somehow I don't see public safety being compromised by ticket sellers being asked to come out from behind the glass windows and help people on the platforms), but there was a sinister WHIFF of MUSCLE FLEXING about it, as though Mr "Scare" Crow wanted to be the first to plant a punch on the Coalition.

(And forgive me, but I'm pretty sure that Mr Gandhi didn't take a hundred thousand pound salary to lead the civil rights movement. On the other fluffy foot, no one wants to see Mr "Scare" Crow in a LOIN CLOTH!)

Next up, ooh scary, the BBC coverage of Mr Balloon's first big speech to the Conservatory conference as Prime Monster is threatened by a "dispute over pensions". No, that one's just PETTY.

(Auntie Beeb is doing an admirable job holding the ring so far: I know that because I'M annoyed that they're uncritically reporting the Unions anti-Coalition propaganda… about the cuts hitting people on benefits hardest…or as I'd put it, the cuts in government services hitting the people who USE government services more than the people who don't… or cuts in government jobs affecting more women than men for the wholly outrageous reason that the government EMPLOYS more women than men… and THEY are annoyed that the BBC is uncritically reporting the Coalition propaganda that the cuts are necessary, as opposed to their entirely legitimate magic money tree point of view. Some bias may have been shown in the last sentences.)

But it's almost like EXTORTION, really: "do as we say or else…"

Or, as a spokesperson for the Policepeople's Union might have said: ain't it terrible all these protection rackets wot these Unions is running. You might want some protection from that, know wot I mean, guv. You see us right and we'll make sure that no… harm comes to you, alright, squire, evenin' all.

Ms Charlotte, aka the new Lady GoreGore, fears that the Coalition will not be strong enough to take the heat when the Unions start to hold the public hostage. Their demands may be selfish, their analysis a denial fantasy, but they have the power to really badword things up for the innocent working person.

I think, perhaps I just hope, that the Coalition is stronger than that. And I think that people might be surprised to see that the STEEL comes from the Liberal Democrats more than the Conservatories.

It is very clear that the Unions the Left and the BBC think of the Liberal Democrats as the "weakest link" in the Coalition. They want to break the Government so they are concentrating their fire on us. I think that's a MISTAKE. Steel just gets STRONGER when it is tempered. And I think that they might find Captain Clegg and Mr Danny, not to mention Saint Vince, are tougher badwords than Mr Balloon and the whole of the Bullingdon Club put together.

Look, if it's TRUE what they claim, and we HAVE lost half our voters to Hard Labour and another half our voters to the Greens and another half our voters to the Alliance of Concerned Mothers and the League of Chastity…

(Okay, three halves is a mathematical JOKE, but hilariously all these exaggerated claims of Lib Dems "defecting to Labour (or wherever)" ARE spiralling out of all credibility: they're pretty close to saying that more members have defected than were in the Lib Dems to start with!)

…but if it's true that we've crashed in the polls, then REALLY SERIOUSLY what's in it for us if we break the Coalition?

We see this through until it works or it doesn't. Or as superannuated muppet Yoda would put it:

"Do or do not, there is no try"

What I'm saying is IF the Unions pick a fight with us, then we're going to have to stand up to them because we're DEAD if this fails and we're dead if we give up part way.

Sun Tsu in the Art of War warns that you should always give your opponent a way to escape, because if trapped they will fight like TIGERS.

But read the constitution people: we HAVE to stand up to the Unions because more than anything else in the World standing up to bullies is what the Liberal Democrats are FOR.

Mr Balloon might not have the stomach for this, but Liberal Democrats have the heart and stomach of a concrete elephant… and the BRAINS of a FLUFFY ONE!

But it DOES NOT have to be like that.

The Liberal Democrats could be the BEST THING for the Unions in this Coalition: people who will LISTEN to you, people who are NOT dogmatic about the cuts but actually willing to be persuaded and change our minds.

Why not try a bit of reason and argument rather than strutting up and down outside Transport House waving your willies at us! Frankly, we'd rather see you in the LOIN CLOTH!


Mr Ben Mathis Tweets pithily: I'm appalled at the idea of strike action over deficit reduction. Public sector strikes will hit the poorest hardest!

Which is superficially very funny, but then rather less so when you think how TRUE it also is.

Regrettably, there's a chance that the people suffering WILL blame "the Government" or "the Cuts" rather than the Union for taking a vindictive and selfish approach to negotiation.

It is so easy for people who are scared of losing their jobs to be persuaded that SOMEONE ELSE is to BLAME and that SOMEONE ELSE should PAY. There's a LOT of "the recession/deficit/cuts are ALL the fault of the BANKERS" about. The banks do bear SOME of the blame – they leant a lot of money to people who couldn't afford it, backed by property that wasn't worth it – but they don't bear ALL the blame.

Just as some people who borrow too much are victims but also willing participants, so the public services and Government-sponsored departments, bodies and schemes are at least a little COMPLICIT in the ever-expanding state sector. It's hard to pin the blame on the managers when money was being waved in their faces by Whitehall, but somewhere at the back of their heads – you would have hoped – they must have KNOWN this was being fuelled by "money from nowhere". They ought to have at least CONSIDERED what might happen if the Golden Goose got croaked.

The real people to blame, of course, are the last Hard Labour Government. They promised people jobs that they couldn't really afford to pay for and then borrowed money to cover up the shortfall, leaving it for the Coalition to sort out afterwards.

That's really HARSH on the people whose job was paid for on a lie.

To Mr Swarovski's assertion: There is an alternative to public spending cuts.

Daddy Alex has a rather more… SUCCINCT response: Yes. Bankruptcy.

But that way you get dragged into a flame war with a Labour troll with nothing better to do with their time than spout angry aggressive dishonest bilge.

Which is a shame because there is WAY too much anger about already – I remain profoundly taken aback by how Hard Labour would much, much rather spend time hurling the word "traitor" at Liberal Democrats than sitting down and sorting out why they lost and what they need to change about themselves to win next time.

(And before the predictable shouts of "you came third; you lost more than we did", I'll pre-empt that with saying that the Liberal Democrats put on a MILLION votes at the election and only the PERVERSITY of the voting system meant that more votes gave us fewer seats! Which only proves our point about how BROKEN the voting system is.)

What Labour and the Unions are doing with their frankly-opportunist opposition for opposition's sake, is to SQUANDER the BEST EVER opportunity to control spending in a public-service friendly way.

If you could just see past your own WRETCHED temper-tantrum at losing power, and realise that you lost power because you threw it away, not because a different party with their own principles and agenda failed to roll over and do as you demanded when you demanded… then you might, MIGHT be able to work out that you should be SUPPORTING the Liberal Democrats, not trying to break them.

I mean THROW US A BONE, why don't you – we're shackled to this bunch of hard-right wingnuts now, have you any IDEA what it's like trying to get them to tack leftwards? Oh yeah, you had Blair…

The Government likes to talk about how it is doing GROWN UP politics now. If you did the same, treated people as ADULTS – accept that you lost the election; understand that the voters chose to believe that the cuts were necessary; don't just flat out deny that the Government has a point of view that is different because they see thing differently and NOT because they are "evil" – if you talk to ministers with a view to balancing the cuts that they are committed to with some amelioration for the most vulnerable, then you could actually do some GOOD for your member (remember them?).

If you bring options to the table then we can WORK with you and present those to the Coalition, if we HAVE an alternative then we can have something to negotiate with Master Gideon. If you give us nothing we have nowhere to go.

Issuing threats, closing the tube, cancelling the Prime Monster's TV appearances… all this posing and performing might make you feel you are big and important, but you are ACTIVELY HARMING the interests of the people who you claim to represent and, to put it bluntly, are compelled to pay you a big fat wage.

On the whole, you OWE those people, so GROW UP!

And one last thing: it's possible that there are union members, union leaders even, who are already thinking this way, who "get" what the electorate – including their members – were saying at the General Election, and who realise that working together is NOT collaboration but a funny old thing we call democracy.

You guys, you need to SAY SOMETHING.

At the moment, the "back to the Winter of Discontent" crew are getting all the air time and the meeja are just lapping it up, salivating at the thought of a good FIGHT. They are – probably – distorting every part of what you want to say and what we want to say in order to make this black and white, black VERSUS white. You provide the pictures There's no news like BAAAAAD news, after all.

I know, I know… you don't want to risk the Union movement looking split. Well the alternative is that you look like the BADDIES.

Which is just FINE if you want the Coalition in power FOREVER. But you know, I thought that just maybe you don't.
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Day 3543: The Unions Don't Have to be Our Enemies – part one, a Land of Denial

Monday:


Seriously, there are TWO ways this can go.

The Unions can represent their members' INTERESTS by working WITH the Government to pilot through the cuts that EVEN LABOUR said were unavoidable, with the maximum amount of attention paid to minimising the harm done to the most vulnerable, keeping the job losses to natural wastage where possible, freezing pay, showing restraint and keeping more workers IN work…

…or they can throw a tantrum, cause fuss and bother to the public whose jobs and taxes actually go to PAY public sector wages and we'll end up sacking a quarter of them.


It is all too obvious that the Unions and the more vocal knucklebrains in Hard Labour have been SPOILING for a FIGHT with the Coalition all summer.

Not a week, barely a DAY has gone by without some new pronouncement of how the Coalition Cuts are going to bring about the apocalypse: the poor will suffer ten times what the rich will; women will be hit harder; race relations will be set back a thousand years; young people will become a lost generation; old people will be rounded up in detention camps with a single winter fuel allowance between them; the North East will be targeted for extermination; cats and dogs living together; human sacrifice… hang on, that's Gozer the Gozerian…

Anyway.

What's REALLY impressive is that the cuts HAVEN'T EVEN BEEN ANNOUNCED YET.

Golly, if only the Left had had such foresight when they were – you know – RUNNING THE DARN COUNTRY for the last thirteen years. Why they might have seen the end of the Housing Bubble and the Credit Crunch coming.

Tragically, no such PRESCIENCE is shown by Mr Mark Swarovski, writing in the Grauniad, who claims that there is no need to cut public spending by a single penny, because he's found a hundred and twenty billion pounds in unpaid taxes down the back of the sofa.

Even if you IGNORE that he doesn't know the difference between tax AVOIDANCE and tax EVASION… £25billion of his total comes from totally legal tax avoidance – i.e people not paying tax that that they DON'T HAVE TO PAY. Basically he's saying you should pay tax on your ISA… or when you sell your house. Fancy paying 40% of the profits when you move home? No?

Even if you ignore that, the figures are just plucked out of his hat…

According to the National Fraud Authority, the Government loses FIFTEEN billion to tax evasion, not the SEVENTY billion Mr Swarovski claims. Fifteen billion IS a lot of money and, as we've discussed before, ought to be a much more promising target, fifteen times more promising, in fact, for the Government than benefit fraud. But you can't just randomly multiply the figures by five in order to fill the gap in the Budget.

Actually, come to think of it that IS what Hard Labour Chancellors do to fill the gaps in their Budgets…

But even if you ignore ALL that… where does he think that that money is going to come FROM?

Extracting an extra hundred and twenty billion quid from the productive part of the economy… that really WOULD be: "taking money out of the economy just as it's struggling to get back on its feet".

Mr Alistair Dalek, former Hard Labour Chancer and Mr Frown's Sooty-puppet, has said that some of the recovery should come from private sector growth.

I couldn't disagree with him more: ALL of the recovery will have to come from private sector growth!

The Government does not produce any wealth. It doesn't grow food or fish the seas or mine anything from the ground, nor does it take raw materials and add value by manufacturing them into something else. The Government ensures the provision of essential infrastructure – transport, power, water, sewerage, peace (at least that's the theory behind having an army) – and can improve opportunities for citizens – through education, health provision and the welfare state. But these are support services. Government does not produce any wealth.

That is why the Coalition is actually CUTTING the tax on business. It's not just for FUN you know – and not, whatever the Trots tell you, to "make our class rich at the expense of the poor"! We're cutting Corporation Tax so that businesses will have more money to invest in jobs and in equipment, and so that foreign companies will move here or stay here.

In Ireland, the Irish Government RAISED its corporation tax rates… and all the corporations just LEFT. That is why the former Celtic Tiger is now a Celtic HEARTHRUG!

You CAN make a case for supporting construction workers through the recession by having the Government borrow to invest in infrastructure projects, new housing and school repairs (and no, Mr Bully Balls, we didn't ACTUALLY cancel the ones that were being worked on), but ADDING people to the Government payroll does NOT cause economic growth. Quite the reverse!

Every extra wage is one that has to be found by taking more tax from the private workers. More tax now or, if you borrow, more tax later.

Worse still, in areas where there is super-high state sector employment, the Government is actively sucking the best workers out of the system, undermining attempts to persuade new business to set up in areas where all the people with drive and initiative and brains are already in Government offices, leaving these areas a jobs wilderness.


So why is Mr Swarovski saying that we can avoid the cuts altogether?

Well, I'm afraid I have to be HORRIBLY CYNICAL and suggest that he knows PERFECTLY WELL what the economic reality is, but he is trying to deceive people – mainly his own Union members, but also the public – in order to wind them up for a fight.

Why?

More on this story later…
.

Day 3542: Economic Literacy Test: Caroline Lucas plays Mini-Me to Bully Balls Dr Evil

Sunday:


I am FED UP of being called "economically illiterate" by people who clearly wouldn't know one end of the economy from the other.

Usually it is the Egregious Ed, Mr Bully Balls who was, don't forget, special advisor to the Chancellor who outspent the government's income for seven years running while letting the banking sector play chicken with a housing bubble.

This time, though, it was the Sickly Green MP Radio Caroline Lucas, repeating the same deluded, deceitful and frankly DANGEROUS dribble on the World this Weekend.

I'll say this once: CUTTING SPENDING DID NOT CAUSE THE GREAT DEPRESSION.


The principle cause, the thing that turned the Wall Street Crash into the Great Depression was the decision by the American government that rescuing banks that had gone bankrupt gambling on the stock market would only encourage them to do it again: so called MORAL HAZARD. So they let those banks go BUST. That wiped out the savings of huge numbers of Americans, businesses, particularly FARMS, as well as individuals, and the American economy IMPLODED.

The effect on Great Britain was twofold: firstly, with the American banks gone, our supply of credit dried up and there was a credit crunch. Secondly, with the American economy gone, our exports dried up too.

British exports were ALREADY in trouble. For starters, during World War part one a lot of our export markets got pinched while we were busy. But then Mr Winston Churchill (remember him? Oh yes) had attached the pound to the Gold Standard at too high an exchange rate making our exports more expensive and so uncompetitive. And then the Unions (remember THEM?) went and called a GENERAL STRIKE which made our exports less reliable as well as even more expensive.

So by the end of the 1920's the economy was a bit TOTTERY anyway, and the American collapse knocked us over like a domino.

Add to that the fact that countries all over the world responded to the crisis in the WORST POSSIBLE WAY™ by throwing up protectionist trade barriers.

So suddenly Great Britain stopped making money.

THIS is where the spending cuts happened. In those pre-Keynesian days the government tried to balance the budget EVERY YEAR, rather than over the course of the economic cycle (if you are a Keynesian) or NEVER (if you are Mr Frown or his Sith apprentice Bully Balls or in this case Radio Caroline).

So the then Chancellor, Mr Philip Mount Snowden cut public sector pay by 10% AND (note this) raised income tax from 22½% to 25%.

This is GENUINELY a case of a government that is "taking money out of the economy". Taxation TAKES money from the economy. Government spending puts it back. In a "balanced" budget you put back as much as you take out. If you INCREASE tax and DECREASE spending the Government is literally REMOVING MONEY from the productive part of the economy.

If there is LESS money in the economy then FEWER people can buy things and this SLOWS the economy further.

The NORTH was hit much the hardest by the collapse in exports, because it was so heavily, too heavily invested in HEAVY industry: mining, shipbuilding, steel-working. In the South, more-flexible light industry sprang up: making things like washing machines and even cars leading to economic growth and recovery in those areas. This was the beginning of the North South DIVIDE as formerly-prosperous parts of the North remained stuffed (at least until rearmament came along and the Government suddenly needed a lot of steel and coal and ships).

Rearmament, incidentally, when the Government said: "forget balancing the budget; we need to buy stuff", is ironically one of the inspirations for KEYNESIAN economics, because that Government spending kick-started the economy.


Now there are some SIMILARITIES to today's situation and some GLARING DIFFERENCES.


We HAVE recently had a big crash on the bursting of an economic bubble; we HAVE been overly reliant on foreign credit (then American, today Chinese); we have seen Government income fall and expenditure rise; and we HAVE seen a MASSIVELY SPLIT Labour Party supplanted by a Coalition of Liberals and Conservatories who have to clean up the MESS.

HOWEVER, this time we SAVED the Banks (however ODIOUS they may have been before and indeed since) so we still HAVE an economy; this time our exchange rate is NOT chained to an absurdly macho level (yes, we were all wrong about that one); this time thanks to the European Union we DON'T see trade barriers flying up between us and our major customers; but equally this time the Government was ALREADY in a lot of debt because of years of uncontrolled overspending and manufacturing was already on its knees from decades of neglect by Governments of BOTH other parties; not to mention the TITANIC (in every sense) over-reliance on the financial sector to keep us afloat: something of a case of Mr Frown placing all our eggs in one ROULETTE WHEEL.

So once again I have to say it's just not as simple as saying "cuts=bad=great depression".

The DANGER of the economy tipping back into recession because of Government making deflationary spending cuts has to be weighed against the OPPOSITE DANGER of the markets losing confidence in British creditworthiness which would see interest rates shoot up, bank lending squeezed even tighter and a whole lot of people laid off when the money just plain RUNS OUT, causing an EVEN WORSE recession.

Frankly, it is seeing both sides of the DANGER that meant the Liberal Democrats had to change their minds about the urgency of the cuts. And anyone who's saying they've got a plan for the economy WITHOUT saying they've at least considered the other threat is deceiving you.





And speaking of things I have to keep repeating, Hard Labour (and Sickly Greens) are STILL calling the Coalition Cuts "taking money out of the economy". This is, to coin a phrase, economically illiterate.

For the last nine years, and for all of the next five (heaven help us) the Government has spent and will spend MORE than it takes out of the economy in tax.

i.e. the Government is putting money IN to the economy.

It has been possible to do this by running up a rather large tab… to the extent that we are in debt for getting on for a TRILLION POUNDS that is a MILLION times a MILLION pounds or twenty grand for every man, woman, child and fluffy elephant in the country.

That is in a word Radio Caroline might understand UNSUSTAINABLE.

The Coalition policy is NOT to "take money out" of the economy but to "put in LESS", eventually to STOP because it ISN'T OUR MONEY.


"Ah ha!" says Radio Caroline, "you're making the mistake of thinking of the country's economy like your household economy where if your income goes down you have to control your spending, but it doesn't work like that."

No, Caroline it REALLY REALLY does work like that.

In an emergency, you can borrow money to cover a gap between your incomings and your outgoings. Maybe there's been a personal crisis, maybe the tumble drier exploded, whatever. You talk to the bank and agree a bridging loan.

Government debt is just a really, really BIG bridging loan.

The "bank" in this case is the world money markets. And just like you might have to negotiate with the bank in order to get the money you need, and just as the bank might give you certain conditions, then likewise the Government has to "negotiate" with the markets, sometimes literally, sometimes by taking action that convinces the markets that the UK's finances are sound and that the investment is both worthwhile and safe.

And just like a bank, eventually, the money has to be PAID BACK.

Radio Caroline's solution is to dump our problems on future generations. Which just shows up the Sickly Green's promises of a sustainable future.

We've been borrowing for years and years and years; we just can't carry on like that.

"Ah ha!" will say Mr Balls, "but Mr Milton Keynes tells us that it is OKAY to borrow. When you are in a hole… KEEP DIGGING!"

Except this is only HALF of what Mr Keynes tells us. The OTHER half is PAY OFF THE DEBT in the GOOD TIMES. Which is exactly what we DIDN'T do for the period of the BOOM YEARS between the dot.com collapse and the credit crunch.

In the late 1930s the British Government COULD borrow money to spend on British industry precisely BECAUSE it had been running PAINFUL balanced budgets up to then; in 2010 we CAN'T because we HAVEN'T.

If you just KEEP borrowing money to prop up your Government spending you end up with a completely different economic model and it is called WEIMAR GERMANY.

The value of your currency collapses; your interest rates spiral out of control; and EVERYONE gets very, very poor very, very quickly.

And yes, that ended up with a nasty bully in charge as well, so you can perhaps see the attraction for Mr Balls.

And another thing!

If one more person repeats this nonsense I swear I will SPIT!

"If you make public sector workers redundant then they stop contributing tax to the Government's coffers"

NO! WRONG WRONG WONG!

It is NOT POSSIBLE for a public sector employee, no matter how lovely and worthwhile and socially valuable, to make a net contribution to the Treasury. Not even if you count all the VAT and airport tax and Stamp Duty that they might pay

Think about it: the VERY MOST that someone could possibly pay in tax is ALL of their earnings and if all their earnings come from the Government in the first place then the VERY BEST that the Treasury could ever do is BREAK EVEN.

And in practice you must have a bit of pay left after the tax or what do you buy your sticky buns with?

In pure CASH terms the Government is always ALWAYS better off NOT paying someone than paying them.

That does NOT mean that the Government SHOULDN'T employ people. Obviously there is a HUGE BENEFIT to be had in having teachers and doctors and policemen and poets laureate (er). And often – though not always – economies of scale mean that the Government can do this more efficiently than the private sector. Can but not necessarily does.

But suggesting that the Government will somehow be worse off if it employs fewer people is STUPID SOPHISTRY.

It's a CON: if you pay me twenty quid I'll give you a tenner back; so now if you don't pay me you'll not get that tenner – you'll be ten quid out of pocket! If you believe that then I'll have ten pounds please.
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Day 3531: Lord Blairimort's "Journey" …straight to HELL

Wednesday:


Frankly, I don't want to see Lord Blairimort interviewed unless it is UNDER CAUTION.

But there he was anyway, with Mr Marrmite, all rictus grin and self-justifying twaddle, dismissing the worst recession ever as "prosperity interrupted" and, worse, implying that his Middle Eastern victims "would probably have been killed anyway".

He was clearly worried that the flesh-toned make-up would run under the studio lights revealing the bone-white pallor, blood-red lips and shocking-green hair underneath.

(Oh go on, admit it: he DOES look like The Joker. The more steeped in EVIL he gets, the more his true "Joker-face" shows through!)


Lord Blairimort's problem, or from his own point of view his greatest asset, remains his wilful blindness to his own failings.

The plus side to this absolute lack of self-doubt is that it makes him the consummate politician: he doesn't NEED to fake sincerity; he genuinely believes whatever it is he says that comes flying out of his mouth (at least for the moment that he says it). The down side is that he thinks he's on a mission from GOD and won’t listen to any other voices (other than "the voices").

Mind you, it's not stopped him developing a really annoying tell: whenever he's going to tell a REALLY obvious whopper, he can't help GRINNING. In fact, when it came to saying "the Iraq war WAS legal" he even started to GIGGLE.

It's possible that he just no longer CARES what anyone else thinks, but what seems more plausible is that he's created his own personal purgatory where HE thinks he's the last honest guy, but NO ONE in the world believes him and he just can't understand why.

"You've got to understand that there IS another point of view," he tried pleading. Well, YOU never accepted that, did you Lord B. A million people marched, but they were all traitors and collaborators and Saddam-lovees.

Really, I'd have more sympathy but, you know, killed hundreds of thousands of people.

It remains impossible not to be TERRIFIED that this MANIAC is still dubbed with the title of "Middle East Peace Envoy". Even HENRY KISSINGER looks shiftily at his Nobel Peace Prize at the thought of THAT.

"There is not a part of the Middle East that is not touched by the same problem that Iraq had," insisted the former First Among Poodles, and both my Daddies shouted out: "Yes, it's YOU!" at the same time.

His bellicose approach to Iran and the danger of their acquiring atomic weaponry demonstrates most clearly that he has learned NOTHING from the DISASTER he helped to precipitate when he conspired with the Monkey-in-Chief to obliterate the Iraqi regime… and anyone who happened to be living within a hundred miles or so of where it was standing.

Looked at from Iran's point of view – and you've got to understand that there IS another point of view, don’t you Lord B, pardon my SARCASM – they haven't invaded ANYONE!

They liberated themselves from a (Western-backed) dictator; they defended themselves from a (Western-sanctioned) invasion from Iraq; they observed the use of (Western-supplied) weapons of mass destruction by the Baathist regime; and they saw a just-plain-Western attack on their former enemy, OUR former ally, when he stopped playing ball. They see us break our own UN rules, they see us turn a blind eye to Israel's rather unsubtle nuclear posturing, they see us doing highly suspicious deals with former foes like Libya, they see the way we turn tail and run when North Korea DOES get the bomb.

Honestly, what are they SUPPOSED to think? Cos I'M stumped!

I'm not saying it's all sweetness and light in the Islamic republic – any country that executes people for being gay daddies (even if they're not!) goes straight to the top of the VILE-O-METER as far as we're concerned (obviously in the UK we merely SMEAR them as gay daddies… even if they're not).

Great Britain's involvement in the Middle East STARTS with LAMENTABLE and goes rapidly downhill from there. Peace and democracy are only created by TIME, not military invasion. And the Iraq war has done NOTHING but entrench hostilities and encourage deranged terrorists across the region.

Asking Lord Blairimort to bring PEACE now is like asking GODZILLA to take charge of Tokyo's town planning. You end up with nothing but ASHES.


The interview concluded with Mr Andy asking Lord Blairimort about his LEGACY.

Hard Labour losing the election was, of course, all Mr Frown's fault, hilariously because he hadn't been "New Labour" ENOUGH.

But if there's anything to CHILL your BONES about the path the Coalition is currently treading, it is Lord Blairimort's tacit endorsement of our policies.

Most telling moment?

Mr Marrmite asks: "your Journey sounds like someone who started out in Labour and moved until he realised that he was a Conservatory and not Labour."

Lord Blairimort: "Well I'm not… er, a Conservatory."

BUZZZ! Hesitation AND deviation!

There's a TWEET going around:

Brighten your day! Move copies of Lord Blairimort's book to the CRIME section of your bookshop.

Sadly it seems Lord Blairimort's signing tour is being interrupted by protestors and he's cancelled at least one appearance. [Added: and another one!] Apparently he was convinced that they could deploy eggs and shoes within forty-five minutes…

People have suggested that the donation to charity of all the proceeds (or is it profits) from his TOME is some kind of BLOOD MONEY, the ex Prime Monster attempting to buy FORGIVENESS for all his crimes, as though the newly-Catholic Lord Blairimort couldn't purchase an INDULGENCE or two from Mr the Pope.

But I'm afraid I can't ascribe anything like so HUMAN a motive to him. To want to BUY forgiveness he'd need to show some sign of WANTING it or even some understanding that he NEEDS it.

No, I'm afraid I think that his donation is more to do with his status with his new chums among the super-rich: it's a gesture of "look how much money I can give away", a keeping up with the Jones only with Bill Gates and Warren Buffet instead of the Joneses.

Still, the British Legion will do very nicely out of it, as the book appears to be selling like hot cakes. Or indeed like yellow cake uranium.

Maybe good intentions are running thin, and the Devil needs a load of doorstops to pave the road to hell. It is, after all, a Journey.
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Day 3536: For Labor Day… Your "Which Monster Are You" guide to the Labour Leadership Contenders, or Why They Are All Dreadful

Monday:


The contest to be the next Labour loser is more and more seen to be less and less interesting, what with most commentators having it down to a grudge match between the two Millipede brothers: Mr Red and Mr Dead.

Apparently it IS possible to tell them apart.

Daddy Richard says that he despises Dead Millipede more for being the British Foreign Secretary who made us complicit in torture and rendition on behalf of the Americans.

Daddy Alex disagrees. He thinks Dead Millipede was ONLY complicit because he is SPINELESS; whereas his younger brother actually LIKES being evil. Or the "Emissary from Planet F… Badword" as Mr Lord Mandelbrot, former First Fractal of Darkness, put it. Talk about takes one to know one!

So we did Votematch's which Labour loser should you support quiz…







…and these were the results we came out with:

Ms Diane: 69%
Mr Red: 58%
Mr Bully Balls: 35%
Mr Dead: 35%
Mr Andy: disqualified for not supplying his own information.

Well, that came as a bit of a SHOCK, I can tell you.

No, not agreeing with Ms Diane – she was against the war, we were against the war, that much is obvious. No, the shock was the big number two for Mr Red. Well, it was until we caught a repeat of the Radio 5 / BBC News Chanel debate and saw him in action, triangulating desperately, trying to appear as the Mr Compromise between every other position possible, and ironically being more Heir to Blair than even his big bro.

In fact, watching them all sat around with enormous day-glo gonks strapped to their faces as they spouted various forms of self-serving dribble, made me realise what a total bunch of WANDERING MONSTERS they are.

(Or, for those of you who've never heard of "Dungeons and Dragons", they're the random, time-wasting hazards that get thrown at you between bits of the plot that actually MATTER.)

Which gave me the idea for doing you a quick spotter's-guide to the "big beasts".

So, roll your five-sided die and determine which of the following you will have to beat up before moving on to the Dungeon of Deficit…


Ms Diane Abbott-and-Portillo is… the Mummy: all wound up in old wrappings, but resurrected with new CGI for diminishing returns.

The problem with Diane is that she can't stop behaving like the kind of five-year-old who is far too pleased with herself. Whenever anyone in the audience said that they voted for a party that wasn't Hard Labour you could hear her barely-sub-vocalised "oh dear"s or "tut tut"s. To the point where it had to be pointed out that this was alienating exactly the people she is supposed to be bringing back to the fold.

And repeatedly applauding herself for being "the one who voted against the war" isn't big and isn't clever – thousands and thousands of people died because we DIDN'T stop it, a fact that fills most of us are filled with REMORSE not smugness.


Mr Andy Crash-and-Burnham is… the Goblin: grotesque sprite of mischief, voted most likely to be squashed by a Mûmakil in the Battle for Minas Tirith

Maybe it's the big, pleading, "don't hurt me" eyes, maybe his face is just made that way, but the poor man always looks like he's wearing too much make-up. Doesn't seem to stop him using the crassest of clichés though, e.g. continually repeating the "Con-Dem Government" line as though it was even funny when it was original.

Played the "it was the most agonising time of my life" card when asked why he voted for war. That's not actually an answer and, worse, it's really not an apology either.


Mr Bully Balls is… the Troll: a huge bruiser of a beast, known for lurking under bridges and on Lib Dem Voice threads deploying their Zombie Arguments.

Mr Bully Balls' advantage is that since he is already known as the big bully he can throw his weight about as it's what everyone expects. Consequently, it's BIZARRE that he's trying to portray himself as the loveable misunderstood one.

To his credit, he's the only one willing to go out on a limb with actual policies. On the down side, his policies are BONKERS. He's the one saying that we shouldn't try to reduce the deficit at all. Economic madness. Tactically, it lets him duck the "Labour said THEY would do cuts" questions but strategically it leaves him open to the "and when the market refuses to lend to us under those conditions and you have to sack every single state employee for lack of funds, what would you do?" question.

Is looking for third opportunity to deny Mr Frown before cock-crow.


Mr Red Millipede is… the Golem: a lumpy, barely-humanoid form made up from spare parts and animated by a magic word, the better definition of spin I have yet to hear.

More twisty-turny than a twisty-turny thing. Clearly trying to position himself as the left-wing (but not TOO left wing) radical by denouncing both his brother and Mr Bully Balls. Becoming obvious, however, that HE is the one using the "dark arts" of spin, leaks and off-the-record briefing to try and undermine the others.

Adopting the INTERESTING position on the war of saying that everyone knew he was against it he just didn't tell anyone. And by "interesting" I clearly mean "easily lampooned" here.

Playing heavily on his position as Cabinet Minister for the Fluffiest Bunniest Possible Department to distance himself from any impression that he may have been part of the Hard Labour Government of the last thirteen years.

Pity that letting slip his desire to "exterminate" the Liberal Democrats revealed his more… Dalek-y side.


Finally, Mr Dead Millipede is… the Vampire: the bloodless, soulless spineless creature of the night; lack of reflection probably explains unwillingness to examine New Labour record in power.

I must confess, for the longest time I expected that, when it came to the count, Mr Dead would top the poll from the outset only to be pipped at the final post as his brother picked up the transfers from the other candidates one by one.

But it's now looking like he is SO far in front that the only thing that could stop him is if Lord Blairimort actually came out with that endorsement.

One suggestion though: a sneering snigger when someone brings up the rendition allegations is NOT going to serve you well, Mr Millipede.

Not that any of this actually MATTERS.

It's all too painfully obvious that Hard Labour are HAPPY to be in opposition, they are COMFORTABLE there and they look to be settling in for a LONG STAY again.

Mr Millipede may be under the COMPLACENT illusion that he can WAFT back into power at the next General Election, perhaps on the back of a Coalition made unpopular by years of cuts and Eighties-style economic hardship, but he's wrong.

History's NOT going to repeat itself. For a start, the devastation wrought by the Queen Maggie in the Eighties was mostly on communities, often in the North, dependent on a kind of industrial mono-culture and those communities just don't exist any more. Mining, steel, shipbuilding… the damage has been done. Actually, if there is a risk it is in places like the North-East where the government directly employs a huge percentage of the workforce.

But more importantly because Hard Labour are not offering any alternative. You can't wish away the years of overspending (as four-fifths of the Labour candidates seem to want to) nor deny them completely if you're Mr Bully Balls. And the hangover is going to be with us for years.

So there's no danger of Hard Labour coming back.

No, the real danger next time is that the Liberal Democrats will take all the blame and that will let the Conservatories win outright!

PS:

Of course, you CAN do this for OUR side too…

Mr Balloon is… the WILL-O-THE-WHISP: the sinister spirit with no substance that lures the unwary to their doom.

While Captain Clegg is… the WEREWOLF: you thought he was just an ordinary little man but OOH! he's turned out to be something much more scary and powerful after all.

.

Day 3532: FINALLY, Some Recognition!

Thursday:


My fluffy diary has, it would seem, been voted 31st Worst Political Blog in Great Britain, and, as far as I can tell, that makes me WORST LIBERAL DEMOCRAT BLOGGER!

It's a moment to be truly proud!

To be RANKED more REVOLTING than such media movers as Mr Benedict "Tell-lie-o-graph" Brogan (48) and Mr Nick "Mate-of-Dave" Robinson (57); JUDGED more JAUNDICED than such Conservatory contrarians as Mr Daniel Hangman (63) and Mr John Deadwood (73); DEEMED more DREADFUL than such egregious egoists as Mr Chris Paul (93) and Mr Hopi Sen (99)… it's more than a fluffy toy deserves!

I'm only JUST not-quite-as-bad-as ConservatoryHome!

Congratulations to NOT-AS-APPALLING-AS-ME Liberal Democrats Mr Liberal Smithy (33), Mr Craig Murrey (42) and Mr Lord Bonkers (97) and anyone else I didn't spot on the list.

I would like to thank my Daddies, Daddy Alex and Daddy Richard, without whom I could not have been nearly as awful and also thank everyone who voted for me (in the hope that it wasn't JUST Mr Dale Winton with his finger on the speed dial).

Honestly, you'd think I was RUDE about people or something!

Day 3524: No, Captain Clegg is RIGHT; the Institute for Fiscal Studies HAVE gone nuts!

Wednesday:



I really, really wanted to write about how we SHOULDN'T be attacking the IFS, because that is just such OLD politics.

But then I tried READING their report.

I am dismayed… no, I'm ANGRY that something this… ILLITERATE is being passed off as a serious piece of research. Worse, that it is FRIGHTENING people.

Their accusation that the Budget is REGRESSIVE hinges on a KEY assertion:

"…the top half of the income distribution gains on average as a result of increases to the income tax personal allowance and the employer NI threshold."

But this sentence is JUST FLAT WRONG.

The less important part is that the EMPLOYER's national insurance threshold DOES NOT affect the employee's earnings – the CLUE is there in the NAME.

There IS a COMPLICATED relationship between the level of Employer's NI (the 12.8% rising to 13.8% extra that it costs your employer to employ you on top of your salary before tax) and the number of extra people that businesses are willing and able to take on (which is why the Conservatories tediously insist on calling it a "jobs tax"), and that does feed in to overall earnings as more or fewer people are IN employment. But that's a second or third order variable, not a direct effect of tax policy… in other words, that's not important right now!

The more important part is that people paying higher rate tax DO NOT BENEFIT from the rise in personal allowance. The threshold for paying the higher rate of tax was LOWERED so as to CANCEL OUT the gain from the higher personal allowance.

In fact, the HIGHEST earners actually do WORSE out this scheme, because Labour's Mr Alistair Dalek introduced a wheeze whereby if you earn above a hundred thousand pounds, your personal allowance gets TAKEN AWAY – so top earners have an extra slice to pay at the higher rate and NO reduction in their basic rate because they have no personal allowance left even after the increase.

Okay, maybe I'm wrong, maybe I've missed something, and I realise that the tax system is excessively complex – I bang on about it often enough – but it seems to me that this is a pretty FUNDAMENTAL thing to get wrong.

Either, the IFS have failed to include the reduction in the upper rate threshold in their computations, or they have completely failed to understand where their figures have come from.

In either case, how is it possible to have ANY faith in the other conclusions that they draw?


Now, I do think it's fair to say that the Coalition's response to this has been a fair way from BRILLIANT.

I mean, on the one fluffy foot there IS a good case to be made that if the IFS want to create a model for how changes to Housing Benefit (which mainly affect the less well off) affect incomes, then they really OUGHT to be doing the same for changes to Capital Gains Tax (which mainly affect the better off) as well.

Because OBVIOUSLY the budget is going to look regressive if you study the things which impact on lowest income groups and IGNORE then things which affect high income groups.

But then on the other fluffy foot we get Government ministers saying: "and you have to take into account the cuts in Corporation Tax".

No, they really, really don't and we look STUPID for saying it.

Of course we HOPE that cutting company tax will mean that companies employ more people thus taking more people out of the lowest income groups. But they might just trouser the difference. Or spend it on buying new equipment from Germany. Or in paying off that tricky bank loan. Or any number of other things.

It's a gamble to restart the economy, not a personal tax measure, and let's not pretend otherwise.

And I can understand, really I can, why Captain Clegg is "slamming" the report for being "partial". Our WHOLE POINT in joining the Coalition was to get Liberal Democrat FAIRNESS added to the Conservatory budget. AND WE DID.

So this is personal.

But I think – I hope – we all agree that the Liberal Democrats would be EXPECTED to say that.

What we really needed was a senior CONSERVATORY, and I mean Master Gideon, really, to come out and say: "we WANT to be progressive and we are DISMAYED that the IFS figures show otherwise and I will be having my team work over the budget again to be sure, but can I just point out…"

Look, it is not impossible that the IFS's central thesis is RIGHT, and we should be DEEPLY CONCERNED about that possibility

The cost of fixing Hard Labour's recession and overspending should NOT fall more heavily on the poorest than on the richest.

We need to be constantly vigilant to see that that does not happen, and if the facts say it is happening, we must put it right. And we need to be SEEN to be doing that.

Which is why the Office for Budget Responsibility needs to be more INDEPENDENT, why we need the Government books to be AUDITED, and why we should WELCOME scrutiny from independent organisations like the IFS.

But how can the IFS report have ANY credibility if they include such a glaring total misunderstanding of how the personal allowance change works? Simply, they can't.


So, I really, really wanted to say we shouldn't just "stick to our guns"; we should ACCEPT that we DON'T KNOW the answers for certain; we should say we'll TAKE ON BOARD the IFS critique and we'll LEARN from it and TRY TO DO BETTER.

But I'm really at a loss to understand how this report HELPS, other than in reinforcing Hard Labour's hysterical, self-serving lies and making good Liberal Democrats doubt the good faith of their own Government.

.

Day 3519: Vengeance of Google

Friday:

Firewall THIS!

Day 3518: How can BOOKS have a FORMAT WAR?

Thursday:


Okay, confession time. Daddy Richard got a present for doing ten years with his company, and it was the CULTISTS' favourite, an Apple SadPad.

Yes, I know.

But once you've got over shaking you heads, perhaps you can help. No, we don't need an INTERVENTION and DEPROGRAMMING just yet, but we do have a question.

You can choose a widget to turn your SadPad into an eReader, i.e: an electronic book-reader that lets you read books electronically, what with half a kilo of circuitry being so much more convenient than this newfangled paper stuff.

The question is: which widget?

The widgets themselves are free, but you have to pay for the books…

Incidentally, did you know that although PHYSICAL books are VAT free, electronic books are not, in spite of them containing ONLY the memetic part of the physical book, so all things being equal an eBook would actually be (once Master Gideon's badword VAT rise goes through) 20% more expensive. Which is nuts.

Anyway, there are probably more, but Daddy has THREE widgets for reading books to choose from: iBooks from (join us, come and join us) Apple, Kindle from Amazon and one called Kobo backed by Boarders and other booksellers.

The problem is this: if you buy a book from ONE of them, you CAN'T read it with one of the others.

Frankly, it's a bit of a liberty! I mean, once you've PAID for it, it ought to be yours to read however you want. But that's what you get for buying into Apple's (join us, come and join us) "we know what is best for you" culture.

And don't get me started on the fact you can't GIFT other people with eBooks!

It's all the same ridiculous paranoia that has poisoned the world of digital music. Rather than being about sharing the creativity, it's all about stamping down on anyone who might make an illicit copy. Video Piracy. Music Piracy. I mean who ever head of a Pirate BOOK, before? (Apart from Mr Simon's Pirate Book, of course.)

What OUGHT to happen, is that you should be able to buy your eBook from ANY independent supplier, download it, and then read it in any of the readers.

The WORST offender is the Kindle. The iBooks and the Kobo both use internationally recognised EPUB format – but then stick their own digital rights management on top, making them non-transferable (no matter what it says in Kobo's admirable mission statement). But the Kindle uses its own bespoke software so it's not compatible with ANYTHING.

In many ways the iBooks reader is the nicest. Apple are GREAT at design (join us, come and join us) and it shows. You can highlight bits of the text and leave notes for yourself which appear in the form of cute post-it notes in the margin. If you turn the SadPad sideways, the book turns into two pages with a "crease" in the middle, like you're holding a real book (the others just show one page widescreened across the Pad).

But the GENIUS thing that it does is to let you highlight a word and then access the SadPad's onboard dictionary. A great big floating box appears which you can scroll though to read the full definition.

The Kindle does something similar, with a highlighted word allowing you to pop up a definition in a small box at the foot of the page. That's less intrusive, but also shorter and, on one occasion, managed to give me the wrong word ("Sho" not "Shoe") which was less than impressive.

But the Kodo reader doesn't do it at all.

That just staggers me. Surely you would look at what your competitors are doing and you'd realise at once that this is a defining essential feature. It's the one thing that an eBook can do that a paper book cannot – tell you what the words mean right there in your fluffy foot, without having to get up and find where the dictionary has gotten buried this time.

In fact, the Kobo doesn't do the highlighting in any form, so there's no making notes in the margin either, or copy/pasting text for short quotations.

The Kobo reader does have quite a nice clean design. Like the iBooks you can customise the font and while it won't let you turn the paper sepia (if that's important to you) it will entertainingly let you customise the shelving in your virtual library, which is a nice touch. But without the dictionary link, frankly what's the point?

The Kindle reader from Amazon is… okay. Unlike the Kobo, you CAN choose sepia "paper", but you only get the one choice of font which is a rather more tiresome omission, unless you're fond of New Times Roman. And instead of going for the "shelves" look of the other readers, the interface has a graphic of a kid reading a book under a tree that I suspect I'm going to tire of QUITE quickly.

All of which would seem to cont against the Kindle if it wasn't for one thing: backed by Amazon, the range of books available on Kindle is simply many times larger than either of the other two, particularly iBooks where the number of books on offer is pitiful. What is the point of that beautiful reader, if there's nothing to read with it? Well, it would be lovely if you could read books from OTHER sellers, but no, it's our old friend Mr DRM raining on THAT particular parade.

And I'm afraid Amazon are using their market muscle to undercut their rivals on price too. And quite significantly: Doctor Who books available on Kobo cost in the range of £6 to £7, on Amazon they're £4 to £5 (iBooks disqualified on grounds of not stocking any); Andrew Rawnsley's "The End of the Party" (essential summer reading for politicos) is £11.25 on Amazon for Kindle; it's £15.99 on the iBook store and £17.26 from Kobo. Those aren't really the sort of price differentials that you can afford to ignore.

So here's the dilemma. Or rather trilemma.

Kobo is the one that approaches nearest to being open access, buy a book from anywhere and read it anywhere, but they're the most expensive and their reader suffers a massive, and indeed critical FAIL by not linking to a dictionary.

iBooks looks lovely, is stocked with features, but carries all the monoculture problems you'd expect from an Apple (join us, come and join us) product and has barely anything at all to read.

The Kindle is a bit basic but gets the job done and has loads of books at competitive prices. But they're trying to impose their own format on everyone else rather than agree to play nice with the EPUB file format that everyone else has agreed. So they are clearly evil.

Or, as Daddy Alex put it: it's like Amazon are VHS and Apple are Betamax (and Kobo are Video 2000 – no, I had to look it up as well).

I don't want to pay over the odds, I don't want to end up with a load of books in a redundant format but I don't want to contribute to someone who's clearly trying to bust the international consensus either.

And I'd so wanted to download a whole load of books to read on holiday next week. Boo!

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Day 3517: One Hundred Days

Wednesday:


So, we made it to one hundred days, a hundred days of the Coalition being "about to be torn apart any moment" by appalled soggy Liberal Democrats or outraged nutter-wing Conservatories.

We'll do the scores on the doors in a moment, but before that I suppose the most significant thing about the Coalition turning 100 days old is the number of commentators who flatly insisted we'd never get here at all.

Have you noticed that recently? The "life expectancy" of the government has quietly dropped from political discussion. It's become accepted that, actually, this government is going to stick.

Only the more frothy Hard Labour chatteristas still insist that the Coalition will split and there'll be another election by Christmas. And that only make them look silly.

If anyone looks likely to split these days, it's Hard Labour, as Leftist Dinosaurs and Blairite War-criminals fall out over whether their Party exists to go for power or for protest. But then "splitting" has always been the obsession of the political left – that explains BOTH the huffing and puffing of that old hypocrit Lord Prescott of Flummery AND the other wise curious (but surprising to absolutely no one) decision of Mr Sunny Disposition of the Labour Conspiracy website to rejoin Hard Labour now that he can have his ideological purity and eat it. (I assume that the renaming of Mr Sunny's website-cum-fabulous-media-career will be happening soon.)

Hard Labour's response to the Coalition continues to be nothing so much more than a particularly pyrotechnic TEMPER TANTRUM. I suppose we should have seen it coming: Hard Labour just turned thirteen, so of course their cry has become, to quote Mr Harry Enfield's Kevin the Teenager: "IT'S NOT FAIR!!!!"

Anyway, enough about them; how have the Liberal Democrat/Conservative Coalition Government been doing?

It's all a bit of a WORK-IN-PROGRESS so far. The Government didn't "hit the ground running" with flashy but ultimately meaningless policy announcements the way Lord Blairimort did in 1997. Policies have to be worked out and talked out in Cabinet before being set in train. But that's a GOOD thing.

Civil Liberties

The big wins here are obvious: I.D.iot cards already on their way out; detention of children of asylum seekers to go as well; and a long-overdue review of Great Britain's draconian libel laws under way.

On the downside, none of this new openness stopped Mayor Bojo the Clown from summarily ejecting the protest camp from Parliament Square. Because nothing says Civil Liberties like seeing the police sweep up a bunch of hippies in a dawn raid. Rolls button eyes.

Marks out of ten: 8

Benefits

Obviously it doesn't HELP that Mr Iain Drunken Swerve has all the personal warmth and charisma of the CHILD CATCHER from "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang", but the IDEA of simplifying and improving the benefit system, helping make work worthwhile, is surely a GOOD ONE.

On the other fluffy foot, does it HAVE to come with all the accusatory language about spongers and malingerers? It's tough enough surviving on benefits without all the language of BLAME. In a recession it's not your fault you're out of work; if you're unwell it's not your fault you're out of work.

Mind you, and I'm sure it is very wrong of me, but I don't half BRISTLE when I hear Hard Labour mouthpieces endlessly repeating the mantra: "cuts in Housing Benefit will hit the very worst off". Housing benefit is to be cut to no more than Four Hundred a WEEK. £400 a week is £20,800 a year and that seems to ME to be quite a lot BETTER OFF than "the very worst off". I'm APPALLED at how LOW benefits are in a RICH and MODERN country like Great Britain, but I do find it a tad difficult to defend the notion of protecting benefits of households receiving over TWENTY GRAND, when there are people getting far, far less than that.

Marks out of ten: 6

Schools

Mr Michael Borogove has made a series of entertainingly spectacular badword-ups in his announcements demonstrating arrogance and ignorance almost up to Hard Labour standards. Building Schools for the Future – Mr Frown's almost MARXIST plan to rebuild every school in the country regardless of need – was a stupid scheme that wasted loads of money on crazy red-tape bureaucracy and it needed ending. But the way it was announced – one huge "look at the size of my chopper" cut – was more about playing to the right-wing audience than doing the sensible thing, and OBVIOUSLY it backfired horribly. If they had STARTED by saying "we want to invest in the schools that really NEED repairs" then it needn't have looked like a sequence of embarrassing climb downs.

And, because the Schools Secretary clearly HASN'T learned his lesson, he then followed this up by ramming his Free Schools policy through Parliament.

There are clearly two reasons for the urgency: number one, they remember Lord Blairimort's big failure and so would rather make actual mistakes by doing stuff that goes wrong than make the mistake of not actually doing anything at all; number two, it's the only policy the Conservatories actually HAD so they need it up and running quick sharp to prove to their own that they're getting something out of this Coalition.

Marks out of ten: 3

Health

Enormous reform of the health service came as something of a surprise to everyone, especially after all Mr Balloon's talk of preserving and ring-fencing. Having said that, getting better value for money, especially when it's so MUCH money, and moving control over finances closer to the front line are both laudable aims.

Opening the NHS up to more private services tends to cause unreasoning PANIC among some people, but really it's one of those things where it should be judged on PRAGMATIC grounds – does it provide a BETTER service for the patient? What are the sanctions if it DOESN’T? Hard Labour's Private Finance Initiative schemes, for example, are BAD because they buy these big "prestige" projects that you're then stuck with, tying up your health spending in long, inflexible contracts, with no way to get out of it if it's not what people actually NEED.

Marks out of ten: 5

Political Reform

If we had a POUND for every time a Hard Labour politician squawked "gerrymandering", we would… well, still be a trillion pounds short of paying off the debts they ran up, but could probably afford a few more sticky buns! The two-faced nature of Hard Labour is never more revealed than through their behaviour over the electoral reform: given a choice between keeping a manifesto promise and opposing a bill that might reduce their unfair advantage they… choose the unprincipled selfish status quo option every time. "Progressive" my big fluffy behind.

There's a huge presumption going around that we are BOUND to lose the referendum on AV. But if that's TRUE, then why are the anti-reform crowd making so much fuss about the date? Clearly THEY don't think that a "no" vote is in the bag, so why should we?

People aren't stupid (no matter what the patronising "the electorate can't cope with more than putting an 'X' in a box" protestors might say). People know that our electoral system is badly broken and in need of change.

And the very fact that we've reached "Day 100" without the sky falling in (unless you count Mr Roger Stavro Murdoch suing Skype over use of the word "Sky") PROVES that all that GUFF about coalitions being "weak governments" was a load of scare-mongering nonsense.

So there's everything to play for.

And the voting referendum – while important – isn't the be-all-and-end-all of the reform agenda. Quietly, Captain Clegg has been getting on with fixing the Parliamentary term. Hard Labour made such a FUSS about the 55% rule that it's going to be INCREASED to a proper SUPER-MAJORITY. And don't forget we'll be getting an elected Upper Chamber.

Marks out of ten: 7

Foreign Policy

Days without illegally invading another country: 100 and counting.

The Captain managed to describe the invasion of Iraq AS illegal from the despatch box. An event that everyone described as a GAFFE. As though SAYING it was somehow more embarrassing than being CULPABLE for it – stares hard at the Hard Labour front bench.

Anyway, Mr Balloon very kindly then went out to show what REAL foreign policy gaffes look like by going to Turkey to insult Israel, to India to insult Pakistan and to America to insult, er, Great Britain.

So far, though, Mr Vague has surprised everyone by being moderately sensible, and sensibly moderate, in talks with Europe. And of course, EVERYONE in Europe LURVES Captain Clegg, because he can apologise for Mr Balloon to them in all of their own languages.

Marks out of ten: 9

The BIGGIE: The Economy

Well, the Chancer of the Exchequer continues to display all the financial skill and economic insight of a man who's only ever played with CHOCOLATE COINS before, but at least it seems clear that he's willing to accept a Werther's Original and sit on the lap of King Mervyn of the Bank of England from time to time.

And we all know that Mr Danny "Champion of the World" Alexander is in charge of the REAL adding up. (With a bit of help from Mr David Outlaw for the really hard bits.)

(The loss of Mr David remains an early BLOW to the Coalition, particularly given the RESPECT he had among Conservatories, which helped bind the Treasury team, and the Parties together. But apparently, Mr Danny is building quite a reputation for himself too, which is good.)

Big picture, though: the Government's economic strategy is both ADMIRABLE and ALARMING at the same time.

There is no denying that the Coalitions agreement to cut spending THIS year is a GAMBLE that might see more people losing their jobs.

The important thing to recognise is that there were, indeed are, TWO threats facing the British economy this year, not just one.

The FIRST threat is the infamous DOUBLE DIP recession that we keep hearing about – the threat that economic growth could falter and fail again.

One of Hard Labour's biggest bluffs is that Government spending is somehow a motor for the economy. This is not true. Only work done by actual PEOPLE generates money. The Government takes money OUT of the economy, moves it around, and puts it back again. That is all it can do.

Government BORROWING can add money to the economy in the SHORT TERM. But in the LONG TERM even that takes more money out than it puts in, because the borrowing has to be repaid with INTEREST.

Hard Labour want you to believe, NEED you believe that government spending powers the economy because they want you to be DEPENDENT on the Government. They may even believe it themselves, because of their belief that the Government is always good and always right (so long as it's a Labour Government, anyway).

The truth is that the Government CAN keep the economy going in the SHORT TERM by borrowing, using that injection of cash into the economy to keep growth going artificially – usually by building things, capital projects, yes, those school buildings that Mr Borogove kind of hasn't actually cancelled – keeping people in employment, maintaining skills, until the private sector can get up off the canvass and take up the slack again. The longer you leave it, the more the private sector has got to grow on its own because it's going to have the Government's borrowing (and interest!) taken back out again.

Labour's sort of argument is that the private economy is not yet off the canvass, and we should still be in the artificial life-support phase of the economy.

(I say "sort of" argument because they would be more convincing if they hadn't been borrowing and borrowing and borrowing to artificially inflate the economy ever since they got re-elected in 2001.)

That is sort of what happened under Queen Maggie back at the start of the Eighties. The Government withdrew its artificial support from areas where there was no private industry, or not enough anyway, and caused enormous misery and hardship. That is what people are so frightened of happening again.

But you CAN'T just KEEP borrowing to keep inflating the economy forever. Or rather you CAN, because that is exactly what Mr Frown did, but when the money runs out you get a TITANIC belly flop, like the one we just saw.

Which brings us to the SECOND risk facing the economy, which is a much BIGGER and SCARIER risk. That is the danger, the very real danger, that the international money markets – the people from whom Mr Frown and Mr Alistair Dalek went a borrowed a TRILLION pounds – might start to see us as a BAD RISK investment.

That is why controlling debt has become especially pressingly urgent since the money-market crisis that struck Greece in the weekend before our General Election.

At the moment, Great Britain can borrow money from the rest of the world (and indeed from our own banks – and a lot of the Government's debt is to British pension funds) for long periods at relatively low interest rates because we've got a pretty good record. Long periods means ten to fifteen years. Low rates means 3% to 3½%. And I say "pretty good"; Japan can borrow at rates as low as ½% because their economic record is immaculate (and remember that, whenever Hard Labour politicos make excuses about Japan having three times as much debt as we do; yes, that's true, but it cost them SEVEN times less to borrow it. In other words, we should have HALF our current level of borrowing to be in the same ball park as Japan.)

If the money markets start to DOUBT Great Britain's economic stability, they will do two things: they will SHORTEN the amount of time they will loan us the money and they will INCREASE the interest that we have to pay. The first will cut Government investment in long term projects. (You are less likely to borrow ten million pounds to build a hospital that will last ten years if you're going to have to repay the cash in five.) The second will just cut Government spending full stop, because there will be less money to spend on anything other than the interest. And as interest rates go up, so does inflation, which undermines growth. And the economy becomes uncompetitive so exports dry up and we earn even less money.

Which of course is what Mr Major Minor managed to achieve in the Nineteen Nineties.

So, basically, you have a choice between the recession of the early Eighties or the recession of the early Nineties.

And like Mr Odysseus navigating between the MONSTER and the WHIRLPOOL, the Government is trying to plot a course that won't see us SUNK. Mr Odysseus choose to err towards the MONSTER, because SHE would only eat SOME of his crew, whereas the WHIRLPOOL would overwhelm them all. Maybe that is why the Government is taking the RISK of the double dip recession, because that way, even if the risk goes badly, fewer people – we hope – will suffer than if the entire economy went under. Again.


Hard Labour, who had, remember, spent MORE than they raised in taxes in every single year since the 2001 General Election (yes, that was seven years BEFORE the Credit Crunch) had a plan to CONTINUE spending more that they raised in tax for every single year of the next Parliament too.

The Conservatories ALWAYS said that they wanted to cut further and faster than Hard Labour, to do the difficult task of getting the Government's spending under control again.

Hard Labour continue to throw up the allegation that the Conservatories have an IDEOLOGICAL desire to see a smaller State. Actually, they say this like it's automatically a BAD THING, and of course it is NOT – the State should have to JUSTIFY all of the things that it does and there's plenty that a good Liberal would say it should not be doing.

But the allegation is not even TRUE.

The aim of the Coalition cuts is no more than to reduce the State to THE SIZE THAT WE ARE ABLE TO PAY FOR. Hard Labour's own DOGMATIC insistence that the State not only CAN do everything but that it SHOULD do everything – right down to micro-managing your diet, exercise, television viewing and bedroom habits – meant spending more and more money – money we just didn't HAVE – doing more and more controlling of ordinary people. Whether they wanted it or not.

The plan – for this Parliament – is only to reduce the size of the State to the size of the money that we've got, so we're not adding to the debt mountain.

And the plan is for the WHOLE Parliament.

There will be SOME cuts this year, but this year's cuts will be comparatively modest, less than one pounds in a hundred. Most of the tax rises and spending cuts will not begin to take place until next year.

That's twelve to eighteen months AFTER we came out of the recession. If we go back into recession this year, it WON'T be because of the cuts, or even the VAT rise. It will be because the economy was too weak after years of Hard Labour; it will be because of pre-emptive and unnecessary action by unions and protest groups; and it will be because of FEAR and PANIC driven by people talking the country down and the possibility of recession up, possibly for their own political reasons.

Don't let Labour get you in a SPIN about this; don't confuse the ANNOUNCEMENT of the cuts with the IMPLEMENTATION of the cuts: the Government is NOT going to lop a quarter of spending off THIS YEAR. The Government is NOT going to make cuts "between" 25% and 40% - departments have been asked to LOOK at cuts of up to 40% for two very good reasons: if they have to look at 40% you can be sure they'll be serious about the first 25%, and if we can cut a little more in some departments then we can cut a little LESS in others, maybe education, maybe housing.

The cuts in spending for departments will AVERAGE OUT at 25% less in 2015 than Labour would have spent. Or rather were going to spend, before they announced their own cuts. The forty-four billion in cuts that were going to be SOMEWHERE – they won't say where, except that it’s nowhere the Coalition look at cutting.

So that's 25% less than Labour on average in five years time. EXCEPT in Health and International Development, because those areas are protected. And when you think about the very VERY worst off, those are the people who the International Development budget is spent on. Protecting the International Development budget means that Great Britain CAN give help when its needed, like it's needed now in the Pakistan floods.



People have been somehow SURPRISED that the Liberal Democrats have not just GONE ALONG with these budget plans, but enthusiastically SUPPORTED them. Weren't we supposed to be to the left of Hard Labour?

Well in the first place, HELLO! We had Master Gideon raise the personal allowance by a thousand pounds and pay for it by increasing the capital gains tax paid mostly by rich folks. That's a more genuine and honest redistribution than any of the complicated Tax Credit schemes and wheezes that Mr Frown and Hard Labour came up with.

And in the second place, did you not notice how we'd been BEGGING the Government to try and get borrowing under control since at least 2003. Nevermind the "Orange Book Tendency", that was so-called lefty, Mr Dr Saint Vince "the Power" Cable.

What we said all along was this: thanks to Mr Frown's TOTAL FAILURE OF MANAGEMENT, the economy got blown to bits by the Credit Crunch, a catastrophe to which we were UNIQUELY vulnerable because Mr Frown based so much of our economic well-being on the FICTION of a PERPETUAL winning streak in the gambling dens of the City of London, resulting in a longest recession in, well, ever, so the economy is now in a FRAGILE and DELICATE state.

Therefore, even thought we WANT to bring down the frankly INSANE level of Government debt, we want to do it CAUTIOUSLY, and based on ADVICE and EVIDENCE.

Our JUDGEMENT, without sight of the books – or Father Dick Byrne's now notorious note that "there's no money left", oh hahaha – was to cut more slowly.

Then Greece happened. Then we had the advice from the Governor of the Bank of England. Then we saw the state of the government's finances.

The facts changed. So we changed our minds.

We were persuaded that the whirlpool was more of a threat than the monster.

(Actually, that sums up the whole decision to for a Coalition with the Tories rather than the Labour Party.)

Marks out of ten: in the balance.


In fact, the REAL fact about a hundred days is… that it's just TOO EARLY to tell.

Most of people's fears are so far JUST fears – there's a bit of EXPECTATION MANAGEMENT by our side going on (tell you it's going to be badword diabolical and then hope that things are only dreadful) and a LOT of whipping up by Hard Labour (prophesying doom and disaster just like the completely DIDN'T before THEY ran the economy into the ground, remember!).

This Government is planning to last for one THOUSAND, eight HUNDRED and twenty four day, so this is just the first 5%. There's another 95% to go, with a lot of REAL pain to get through, but hopefully some light at the other end of the tunnel.

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