Operation Doomsday

SATURDAY, APRIL 25, 2009

Operation Doomsday

Found in First Class

Yesterday, the Major was returning from a Regimental luncheon on the 16.45 to Portsmouth Harbour. Keen not to nod off and overshoot Guildford again, he looked around for a discarded copy of the Sun to read. But slotted down the side of his seat he found one of those Top Secret documents government ministers and officials leave lying around on public transport.

Entitled "Operation Doomsday", it seems to be a briefing from General Secretary Brown to the inner Commissariat:

"Comrades!

As agreed, we have intitiated Operation Doomsday (OD) - the final destruction of the Evil Tories. When they win the forthcoming election, they will inherit the toxic legacy to end all toxic legacies. They will open the books and discover we are literally bankrupt.

By the middle of the next decade, government debt is set to exceed 100% of GDP, the universally accepted definition of a banana republic, and a level guaranteed to ensure a panic flight from sterling and a collapse in the financial markets.

But we have laid a cunning trap. Our budget projections have disguised the true extent of future borrowing by the use of wholly unrealistic assumptions for growth, hidden and unachievable public spending cuts, artificially low debt servicing costs, and no allowance whatsoever for the cost of bank bailouts. The true outlook is massively worse than anyone suspects.

In June 2010 the hated aristocrat Cameron will face an insoluble problem.

If he increases taxes, he will snuff out any vague chance of economic recovery, drive many of his voters abroad, and finally destroy all credibility with his plutocrat backers.

If he cuts spending, it will quite rightly be seen as a direct attack on babies, silver-haired grannies, and hard-working families.

But if he does nothing, international investors will stop buying gilts, sterling will collapse, and he'll have to crawl on his belly to the IMF. Which, I may remind you, is an organisation currently headed by a French Socialist, but soon to be headed by myself.

He will have only one real option - inflation. He will have to inflate the debt away, just as we did over the three decades following the second world war.

But inflation will impoverish the rentier class. Cameron will undermine a vast swathe of his own electoral support. The hated Tories will splinter and disintegrate as a serious political force.

In 2015 we will sweep back to power. We will establish a socialist hegemony that will last for a thousand years!

Comrades, we are engaged in an historic class struggle. Final victory beckons. We are on the brink."

****

Gordo's got some neck, though.

Yesterday he was out and about claiming that the Tories would slash public spending and sack thousands of hard-working nurses and teachers. He said:

“Our New Labour government, we are taking the right decisions for the long term and the short term. What would the Conservative Party choose to do? They would do nothing but cut, cut and cut again the services on which we depend. They would be cutting services this month, next month and every month thereafter. And even in the most difficult years for people, they would be cutting the services before breakfast, before lunch and before dinner. The Conservatives have a duty to tell us how many teachers, how many nurses, how many doctors would lose their jobs.”

He entirely overlooks the fact that his own budget incorporates massive public spending cuts with virtually no detail on what will be cut.

According to the excellent IFS analysis, taking the Pre-Budget Report and the Budget together, Brown is planning for a fiscal tightening by 2017-18 in excess of 6% of GDP (around £100bn pa in current money). But hardly any of it is specified - the announced tax rises account for well under 1% of GDP, and the rest is unidentified:

Brown clearly believes he's manoeuvred the hated Tories back onto his chosen battlefield of public service cuts.

Maybe he really has gone potty.