Dem cuts - by Richard... Sunday, March 27, 2011

Dem cuts - by Richard... Sunday, March 27, 2011

Nothing new to this blog's readers, but Booker has a go at the "increasingly surreal state of our public finances", as highlighted by several events last week, not least the Budget. There, those who could stomach listening to the preposterous Osborne, will recall that he claimed he was intended to encourage growth in the economy while continuing to remedy the hole in our bank balance created by the last government's reckless overspending.

Yet, despite the general impression that the Cleggerons are cutting back on public spending – as Channel 4's Jon Snow put it, we are facing the most severe cuts since World War Two – the budget revealed that our spending will in fact increase even faster than we were told it would last October.

In the small print of last year's spending review, little George told us that annual spending was due to rise from £696 billion to £739 billion in four years' time. In the small print of last week's Budget, spending is projected to rise from £694 billion this year to £743.6 billion in 2014-15, an increase of some £50 billion. That, of course, makes it even more bizarre that we should be throwing money at the Libyan adventure, to which effect Booker brings up the issue of the million-pound Storm Shadow missiles.

That invites a rather entertaining comment that "Baroness" Ashton's remuneration and pension package, servants, cars, homes and expenses, amount to about £1m per annum, same as the missile. Why don't we drop her on the Libyans?

If we could then enlist the RAF to drop off the 500,000 or so who were demonstrating against the "cuts" yesterday, then we might at last have found something useful for the junior service to do – even if Ryanair could probably do it cheaper.

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The tyranny of the crowd - by Richard... Saturday, March 26, 2011

As the public sectariat go on the march to protect their grip on our wallets, Liam Halligan, chief economist at Prosperity Capital Management, asks a few questions:

Why aren't Osborne and Co. explaining these catastrophic realities [of our debt serving costs] and their impact on our medium-term ability to maintain our public services, using them to rally support for austerity measures that are long overdue? Why aren't such stark facts thrown back into the face of those who claim that the Tories' retrenchment plans are "driven by ideology rather than necessity"?

The answer, he then says, is "fear and a lack of respect". Fear that the British public would be critical of such candour. And a lack of respect for their intelligence.

It is that latter response which caught my eye. You can treat the British public in one of two ways. Either, they are the gormless, lumpen masses of the type that we see marching today in London. Or they are thinking individuals. There is a huge overlap, the difference being between "the crowd", and the individual.

The crowd has an animal intellect, and reacts emotionally. It has no IQ, as such. Only the individual thinks – and the decisions made will vary according to whether the individual is in charge, or subsumed by the crowd psychology. "Osborne and Co" cannot see individuals. They see the crowd, without intellect ... the "sheeple" to be led by the nose and deceived.

And there, it suddenly occurred to me why they do it. Because they can. Voting, although done in the privacy of a polling booth, is a "crowd" activity. People don't vote. The "crowd" does. And that's how the likes of Osborne and Co get elected in the first place. The get elected by the crowd.

How you change that, I don't rightly know, but if we can't change the electorate, we have to change the system. Otherwise our politicians will continue to have a lack of respect for our intelligence and, as we observed, continue taking the piss.