George Osborne

Do you really want to be trapped on an island with these people?

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So, we’re halfway into the second week of what’s going to be a tedious and depressing EU referendum campaign. I wouldn’t be surprised if half the country has already become bored and irritated by it all.

I’ll come straight out and say that I’ll be voting to stay in. There’s a lot wrong with the EU, and the only way to fix the problems is by staying in and arguing more effectively for reform*. Also, it’s naive to think we won’t be affected by EU policies if we leave. We’ll still have to meet the standards they set if we want to trade with them, and there’ll be a load of new restrictions on travelling, living and working on the continent.

My stance puts me in the unsavoury position of being on the same side as David Cameron, George Osborne and Tony Blair. I’ll live with that. Not least because of the incredibly low quality of so many of the Brexit supporters. A short list, off the top of my head-

Nigel Farage A caricature of the worst stereotypes of England made flesh. The only good thing I can say about Farage is that, whichever way the vote goes, he’s going to be even more irrelevant after June.

Boris Johnson A man who plays the buffoon in the hope that we’ll not notice all his cheap political game playing. And the fact that he is a bit of an incompetent. It’s hard to take seriously any claims that Boris’ stance is for anything other than the chance to be leader of the Tory party and possibly PM.

Michael Gove Gormless, useless little man, who has only got as far as he has by taking advantage of the friendship he has now betrayed with the Prime Minister.

Iain Duncan-Smith Let’s face it, Duncan-Smith wants out of Europe to save his own skin. He’s scared that a European court might one day hold him to account for introducing policies that have driven thousands of the most vulnerable to early deaths and pushed people to suicide.

Nigel Lawson Walnut faced former Chancellor who now makes millions of pounds conjuring up weak arguments for gullible climate change deniers to keep spouting, thus slowing down progress on fixing the greatest imminent threat to everyone’s way of life.

John Redwood Supposedly hyper-intelligent former minister, who was once known as the Vulcan, but now looks more like Dobby the house elf. Redwood’s highly intelligent and deeply considered opinion on matters of climate change and energy policy somehow always sounds like the sort of thing Nigel Lawson’s group has dreamt up for gullible climate change deniers to repeat endlessly.

David Icke Really. David Icke supporting something is the equivalent of having it stamped “100% guaranteed bullshit”.

These are the people who will be running this country if the referendum results in us leaving (well, apart from Icke, he’ll probably say something incoherent about lizards, then disappear back to wherever it is he hides). They are scum, and they’ll be even harder to escape from, because they’ll trash your chances of going to live and work in Europe.

A vote to stay could be the first part of a double whammy. First, do serious damage to the careers of the would-be leavers by rejecting their campaign. This will have a knock-on effect of destabilising, maybe even splitting, the Conservative party**, offering an opportunity for more sensible parties to sweep in and kick them out at the next election.

It might not happen, but I’m an optimist.

*And kicking out all the UKIP MEPs. Really, is there anything less useful than a UKIP MEP? They’ve been elected to something they want the country to leave, and their constant refrain is how terrible the EU is for Britain. They could use their positions to fix those problems, and make things better for thr UK. But then, that would show that the EU is capable of doing good things for Britain, making the case for staying in. So UKIP MEPs must just sit on their hands and make things worse, because it’s the only way they can achieve what they want. They’re actively making things worse for us, under the pretence that they’re working to make things, somehow, better.

**Actually, either result could have this effect. But In is the best for the majority of us.

We are governed by incompetent morons

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The deficit has risen. The temptation is to say ‘despite George Osborne’s austerity policies’, but the truth is more that the deficit refuses to go down because of them. George Osborne is an economically illiterate incompetent, but at least the damage he’s doing to the country won’t affect him. Even if austerity was working, it would still be the wrong policy, because its lasting effect will be to destroy everything useful and decent that the Government does.

Still, at least Osborne’s uselessness isn’t driving a drastic increase in suicides, like Iain Duncan-Smith’s is.

George Osborne really wants to take money from the people who can least afford to lose it

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George Osborne is said to be plotting cuts to target housing benefit to pay for his climb down on tax credits.

The Chancellor is desperately looking for welfare cuts elsewhere after being forced to rethink the £4.4billion cuts to working tax credits.

Cuts to Housing Benefits will probably put people out of their homes and on the streets, because you can bet private landlords aren’t going to be nice enough to drop their rents in line with any changes.

Osborne is an economically illiterate, ignorant incompetent. At least, that’s the charitable version. If he really understands the damage his party’s policies, and particularly his budgest, are doing then he’s a callous, sadistic little bully.

Source: George Osborne ‘targets housing benefit’ to pay for tax credits retreat – Mirror Online

What a surprise- “Osborne plan has no basis in economics”

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The chancellor’s plans, announced in his Mansion House speech, for “permanent budget surpluses” are nothing more than an attempt to outmanoeuvre his opponents. They have no basis in economics. Osborne’s proposals are not fit for the complexity of a modern 21st-century economy and, as such, they risk a liquidity crisis that could also trigger banking problems, a fall in GDP, a crash, or all three.

I don’t think that Osborne is completely economically illiterate, he just wants to create traps for the shadow chancellor. Deficit is the bad word. If another politician said that they couldn’t promise to avoid a deficit, the Tory press would be all over them.

Source: Osborne plan has no basis in economics | Letter from Ha-Joon Chang, Thomas Piketty, David Blanchflower and others | Politics | The Guardian

Tory press cheers on £3bn cuts… but ignores anti-austerity IMF report

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Today’s right-wing newspapers commit sins both of commission and omission. What they do and don’t say about economics today is very revealing. First, the omission. As Left Foot Forward reported yesterday, along with the Guardian, the Economist and others, the International Monetary Fund has published a report arguing that focus on cutting national debt rather than investment can do more harm than good. It said a bit of debt won’t actually hurt your economy, and will naturally be swallowed up by investment-led growth. Predictably, since this strikes to the root of the Tory government’s rationale for its economic policies over the past five years, (and for the five to come), the paper has been ignored by today’s right-wing print newspapers.

I’m shocked, shocked, I tell you, that most of the press in the UK is so obviously biased. Did the supposedly leftwing BBC mention this? I bet it didn’t.

Source: Tory press cheers on £3bn cuts… but ignores anti-austerity IMF report | Left Foot Forward

The austerity delusion | Paul Krugman | Business | The Guardian

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A long read, with economics related stuff in it, but worth working through.

Short, angry version- austerity is bullshit and held back economic recovery. The Conservatives are either economically illiterate or only imposed it because of pressure from big business and their rich friends. And Labour are a bunch of pathetic cowards because they’ve been bullied into promising to stick with a failed policy.

Source: The austerity delusion | Paul Krugman | Business | The Guardian

The Cost of Cameron: 100 Worst Failures of David Cameron’s Government from May 2010 to Dec 2013

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The Cost of Cameron, by Éoin Clarke
The 100 worst failures of David Cameron’s Government from May 2010 to December 2013. (note all 100 points are evidenced. Click on the word “evidence” at the end of each point to reveal the proof of the claim made therein.)

via The Green Benches: The Cost of Cameron: 100 Worst Failures of David Cameron's Government from May 2010 to Dec 2013.

This government is so bad I don’t even know where to start

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I want to direct some justified anger at the government. They seem intent on destroying everything good about this country and leaving behind a wasteland which only benefits billionaire tax evaders, incompetent bankers and Paul Dacre.

The problem is, almost every week they do something else appalling and the anger gets diverted and redirected. It’s almost as if their survival policy is to keep wrong-footing decent people by throwing up a smokescreen of ever changing petty, sociopathic, shit ideas so that we’re too confused about what we should be aiming at. Anyone who tried to confront Cameron, Osborne or Clegg with even a small list of the things they’re fucking up would run the risk of looking like a babbling, incoherent weirdo.

Having said all that, here’s another five reasons to hate these scum.

It used to be that when politicians wanted to bury bad news they’d orchestrate its release to time with a distracting event. Seeing Iain Duncan Smith publicly criticized for wasting at least £140 million of public money over Universal Credit at the start of this month, it struck me how we’ve slowly reached another level. “Unmitigated disaster”? “Alarmingly weak”? These words were used to describe Universal Credit but could easily have been levelled at a number of largely unreported changes to the benefit system. Nowadays, bad news is buried by even worse news. The sheer volume of inefficient and unethical changes to social security this Government has enacted means some of it doesn’t even get noticed. Which, for a set of politicians hacking at vulnerable people’s support systems, is worryingly convenient.

So, here’s five benefit changes the government doesn’t want you to know about.

5 benefit changes the government don't want you to know about.

They really are the greenest government, after all

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When David Cameron promised that a Tory government would be the Greenest ever, no-one really believed him. But, if you take a different interpretation of green- inexperienced, unqualified for what they’re doing and incompetent- I think he was right.

The Environment Secretary is ready to believe any lie, so long as it casts doubt on climate change. The Health Secretary believes in homeopathy. Most people wouldn’t trust the Education Secretary with crayons and the Chancellor doesn’t understand money*.

So, Dave has given us the greenest possible government, which is a terrible thing.

*To be fair to Gideon, he seems to be in tune with the financial industry. He’s enamoured of the same bad ideas and has the same dumb faith as them that their imaginary money schemes will pay off when experience says they’ll just bankrupt everyone but the bankers again.

…and this is why people think the Tories are scum

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Allegedly, the victim-blaming, bullying, poor people killing changes to the Social Security, the NHS and anything else the Tories feel like destroying are all about helping decent, hard working types. People who “who get up in the morning and work hard” in Osborne’s own words. Except that, as their wrong-headed policies continue to be useless, they’ll need to find another bunch of people to blame, and those scapegoats will be the low-paid.

Minimum wage could be frozen or cut if it starts to cost jobs or damage economy, Government suggests – Telegraph.

Cameron, Osborne and co. will shaft anyone less powerful than them in the name of their dogmatic, greedy and useless policies. If they really wanted to bring the benefits bill down, they’d raise the minimum wage, because lowering it is just using taxpayers’ money to subsidise unscrupulous companies. Introduce the Living Wage and you reduce the number of working people who are still so poor they need benefits (80% of benefits claimants, I read somewhere) and stimulate the economy in numerous ways.

But the Tories won’t do that, because they’re scum.