Britannia Radio

TELEGRAPH   26.11.08
Debts up, taxes up, unemployment up, welcome back Old Labour
Now it's serious. Not since Hitler parked his tanks on our 
neighbours' lawns have Britain's public finances deteriorated at such 
an alarming rate.
  By Jeff Randall

Government's annual borrowing will hit 8pc of national output next 
year. The state's unprecedented debt binge is slated to go on until 
it reaches £1 trillion in 2012. These are Treasury numbers, so the 
crisis is almost certainly worse than that. Its forecasting record 
could not be less impressive had it employed a team of gibbons to 
throw darts at Old Moore's Almanack.

Unemployment is heading for 3m. Bankruptcies are running at record 
levels and home repossessions soon will be. Net new mortgage lending 
is on the brink of collapse, destroying prospects for a quick bounce 
in property prices.

In a stunning display of reverse alchemy, golden rules of fiscal 
discipline have been transmuted into 24-carat guarantees of higher 
taxes. The new top rate of 45pc is just an hors d'oeuvre. Why stop 
there? Under the battlecry "Needs Must", what's to prevent Cabinet's 
class warriors pushing for 50pc, or even 60pc? Hazel Blears and 
Harriet Harman would love it.

The scale of damage done by the Blair-Brown project is only beginning 
to emerge. The bills, mounting daily, will bear down on our 
collective finances for decades. The Government and its pathetic 
apologists can no longer pretend that our problems are someone else's 
fault. The game is up. It has not just presided over a fiasco, it has 
orchestrated one, promoting a credit-card culture in which greedy 
lenders and reckless borrowers ran amok. [and today they have the 
nerve to try to make credit card companies give credit more cheaply 
and threatening them with penalties"unless they start giving 
customers a better deal," -cs]

The upshot was the death of saving, public and private: crashes to 
crashes, bust to bust. The state's coffers are empty because 
taxpayers' resources were squandered by a leader in shameless pursuit 
of votes.

Personal debt has ballooned to £1.4 trillion, four fifths of which is 
underpinned by an unstable housing market. An occupational pension 
system, once the envy of Britain's competitors, is in pieces, broken 
in part by Labour's spiteful tax raid.

Unbridled immigration, which provided a short-term answer to skill 
shortages, is about to backfire. As the labour market tightens, those 
with transferable skills - Polish plumbers - will move on to greener 
pastures. Those without will stay. Resentment over foreign benefit 
claimants will rise.
Gordon Brown mistook a glut of cheap money and a global bull market 
for his own administrative genius. In so doing, he wrecked the 
economy. Had the Prime Minister been running a company, instead of a 
country, he would be facing an inquiry into allegations of criminal 
negligence.

The pre-Budget report is a 232-page charge sheet, replete with 
details of past misdemeanours and those still to come. It was 
constructed by a chancellor [or by the prtime minister ? -cs] who is 
either a psychopathic self-delusionist or an ecstasy addict.

His assumptions about the likelihood of recovery next year make Mr 
Brown's ludicrous boast that Britain is "better placed than rivals to 
withstand a downturn" seem almost balanced. Even Will Hutton of the 
Work Foundation, for so long an admirer of New Labour, laughs at the 
"absurdity" of this claim.

Aiding and abetting Alistair Darling's assault on our intelligence 
are Yvette Cooper, Chief Secretary to the Treasury, and Lord Myners, 
the latest in a long-line of Mr Fixits hired by Downing Street to 
provide a veneer of commercial nous to a Government that has no 
understanding of business.

Youthful Miss Cooper looks and sounds like a deputy head girl who is 
thrilled to parrot the latest script handed out by Sir. Her greatest 
achievement is to have enjoyed a world-class education - Oxford, 
Harvard and the London School of Economics - without losing faith in 
destructive welfarism.

She specialises in offensive platitudes, each of which is followed by 
the condescending assertion, "because it's the right thing to do". 
She repeats this over and over, as if hoping that the force of 
incantation will convert mindless propaganda into effective action. 
It is wishful thinking dressed up as policy.

Lord Myners is very different. Unencumbered by modesty, he has been a 
teacher, journalist, fund manager and board member of several 
important companies, including Bank of New York, Coutts and Orange. 
Unlike most government ministers, he does have real-world experience.

But hearing him talk about efficiency, I recall his "finest hour" in 
business when, as chairman of Marks & Spencer, he led the resistance 
to Sir Philip Green's putative 400p-a-share bid for the company. That 
was in the summer of 2004. At the time, M&S stock market worth was 
about £9bn.
Today, the company's shares are 220p and the business is capitalised 
at £3.5bn. One sees how Lord Myners fits effortlessly into Mr Brown's 
idea of delivering value for money.

Bizarrely, the Prime Minister has never looked happier. His dream is 
coming true. More than 900,000 public sector jobs have been created 
under his regime, banks have been nationalised and taxes are rising. 
Britain is not yet a command economy, but we're on the way. Welcome 
back Old Labour.