Sometimes I find reality is becoming fantasy and it’s a bit disconcerting.
As a nation we’ve run out of borrowed cash but the tills are ringing madly - (all together now)“Jingle Bells! Jingle Bells! Spend it while you can. There’ll be no more in future years, For that’s the cunning plan”.
Brown himself has caught the madness and I saw yesterday a good summary :- “Incontinent Brown is an good description. He went to China and gave them 50 million, even though they have $2trillion in reserves. He went to India, who can afford a nuclear arms program and space program and gave them £825 million. He went to Africa and got us paying for their education systems. He went to the Commonwealth summit and handed out £800 million. He goes to Brussels and hands out £1.5 billion. God help us when he goes to Copenhagen, that is going to be a very costly trip aboard for British tax payers.
It would be very good for a deficit if someone could confiscate Gordon Brown's passport, his overseas jaunts are a luxury we cannot afford.
PS I looked at Dfid's website, here is said we have given China $118 million, WHY? Of course with the spendtrift politicians we have in Westminster none of them will too bothered about it” - JINGLE BELLS indeed!
Christina
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TELEGRAPH 12.12.09
Alistair Darling's work of fiction has shoppers splashing their imaginary cash
It was an ex-Chancellor, Denis Healey, who said a few years back: "Three things happen when you get to my age – first your memory starts to go . . . and I have forgotten the other two."
By Alistair Osborne
Young Denis did have the excuse of being 102 at the time, or something similar (numbers are so hard to keep track of nowadays). But what excuse do the rest of us have for what looks like wilful collective amnesia?
It was only on Wednesday, if anybody can remember that far back, that up popped one of Healey's successors to remind us of the nation's eyebrow-raising £178bn deficit. What, you wonder, is our main response to that little
missive from Alistair Darling? A mass shopping spree.
Over at Barclays Bank, its retail therapists are predicting a record £23bn spend on debit cards this month, up 4pc on last year. Not to mention £17.8bn of cash withdrawals.
It's the season of goodwill and all that. But where, you ask, has all this money come from in a nation so strapped for cash? Santa's grotto? Actually, it's better than that. We've just invented it.
We feel flush for the same reason the bankers have lucked out. Under Darling and his partner in crime next door, Britain has stuffed so much cheap money into the economy, driven interest rates to the floor and maxed 0out on quantitative easing. The upshot is that the holder of the average £103,000 floating rate mortgage has made an annual £4,635 saving. Just think of all the pressies that can buy.
Which brings us to the real scandal of this week's pre-Budget report: that this discredited Government, living in its looking-glass world, cannot even bring itself to get real. Rather than provide a credible plan to get us out of the mess we're in, it prefers to peddle a delusion. Who can blame the shoppers when our leaders simply won't own up to what's going on?
Yesterday, Gordon Brown came up with the likely story that it was "completely wrong" to suggest he'd told his neighbour to rein back on the old public spending cuts for fear of a Labour pasting at the election. True or not, there's no getting away from the fact that the hapless drone Darling chose to deliver a work of fiction, built on the notion that the deficit could be magicked away by taxing the rich – rather than chopping Brown's client state. Luckily, the market provided a reality check – choosing the next day for a huge sell-off of British gilts.
Neither was the Institute of Fiscal Studies taken in. To make the PBR numbers stack up, the IFS reckons public spending will have to be cut by as much as a fifth – the biggest reduction since the International Monetary Fund bailed out Britain in the 1970s. Like Denis, we'd all prefer to forget about that. Whether we should is a different thing altogether. Happy shopping.
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Cunning tax plan is a comedy of errors
Sometimes you wonder if Alistair Darling has not actually modelled himself on his namesake from Blackadder. You recall the sort of stuff. On being sent to the trenches and being ordered to go over the top, Captain Darling declared: "I made a note in my diary on the way over here. It simply reads 'bugger'."
Perhaps a similar thought flashed through the Chancellor's mind when the Government made its decision to go to war with Britain's bankers. Even if they deserved being shot down for their increasingly crass behaviour over bonuses, the Government's Bank Payroll Tax is straight out of the Baldrick school of "cunning plans".
Within seconds of its announcement, the tax started unravelling – the most obvious loophole being that bankers can defer their bonuses for a year. Some of the worst offenders have already dodged the bullet too by having their basic pay jacked up.
Apart from the damage caused to the City of London from knee-jerk taxes, there is also the inevitable appearance of our old friend: the law of unintended consequences. So badly drafted is the tax that it has caught Britain's stockbrokers in the cross-fire – advisory businesses, not lenders, which, let's be clear, did not require any taxpayer bail-out.
As Blackadder himself might put it: "There hasn't been a war run this badly since Olaf the Hairy, king of all the Vikings, ordered 80,000 battle helmets with the horns on the inside."
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