An Unlimited Supply!
Crisis – what crisis? This crisis: A National Debt standing at more than 200% of Gross Domestic Product; a Tory Government of wealthy individuals in thrall to the City of London, more concerned with the defence of property than rising poverty, instigating ever-more punitive punishments to curb civil liberties, interfering with the process of the law and suspending Habeas Corpus; a weak and divided Opposition.
This was the state of affairs exactly two-hundred years ago, at the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Yes, wars cost money; and that particular long-running conflict was expensive not merely in terms of the high price paid by human lives. Compare the post-Waterloo financial crisis to the present day one: at the end of the last calendar year, Britain’s National Debt stood at 75.7% of GDP. Still a long way to go to match 1815, but the current Debt is being added to on average by about £2 billion a week. The National Debt is increasing courtesy of the government budget deficit, but the two are not one and the same; however, if politicians occasionally confuse the two (including our Dave), then it’s no wonder the layman does likewise. And, not being an economist or even especially good at maths, I’d count myself as a layman.
But, fear not, you haven’t wandered on to the FT website; I confess to losing concentration within a matter of seconds when confronted by the markets. The only markets I’ve ever been familiar with are ones containing stalls run by men who look like Bachman Turner Overdrive roadies asking me ‘Ave ye got any copies of Fangoria?’ when offloading old magazines onto them for a couple of quid. If I hear of Euro Lottery winners scooping £28 million, the numbers are rendered meaningless. Would those lucky bastards really notice if they received £18 million instead? Would the loss of £10 million from their bank account make much difference to their plans for ‘helping out the grandchildren’? Once amounts of money bypass the paltry limits I’m accustomed to, I tend to get lost. If I were in their shoes, I’d probably go the way poor old Viv Nicholson went when she won the pools in the 60s and famously proceeded to spend, spend, spend; it’s bound to send you a little round the twist when facing such an inconceivable increase to your ready cash. So, when I hear the National Debt stands around £1.56 trillion, it may as well be £1.56 zillion. All I know for sure is that we’re talking quite a lot of money. Perhaps if it were laid out before me in nice, neatly stacked notes I’d have a clearer idea.
The Coalition Government has spent the past five years telling us the coffers installed by their predecessors were manufactured by Old Mother Hubbard; endless references to the infamous note left behind by the outgoing Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Liam Byrne (despite echoing similar sentiments expressed by Tory Chancellor Reggie Maudling to his Labour successor Jim Callaghan in 1964) have supported the blame game; and half-a-decade of austerity cuts we were told were necessary because of the deficit haven’t enabled the government to meet its targets. Miraculously, however, there is suddenly a surplus of money that will fund the manifesto promises, such as £8 billion for the NHS promised by the Tories. Where the hell did that come from? Andrew Marr attempted to ask George Osborne where it came from last weekend – eighteen times in one interview (beat that, Paxman!); and he still didn’t receive an adequate answer.
Mind you, a government eager to keep the keys to their sumptuous official residences will invariably promise the earth in order to achieve their aim. Opposition parties will do likewise to get their hands on those keys; and we’re currently in the middle of a bidding war in which money is seemingly no objective. It feels as those desperate to govern us are no better than compulsive gamblers prepared to put the family silver on the 3.30 at Kempton Park or ITV desperately pouring their resources into tired old game-show formats under a ‘Super Saturday’ banner in the hope that they can hoodwink the viewers into tuning in every week. Those more knowledgeable than me have emphasised the sums don’t add up, and I can’t quite decide if it’s comforting or worrying that some of the people making these promises appear to be as bad at maths as I am.
It must be acknowledged that Gideon isn’t alone when struggling to provide answers to perfectly reasonable questions, though; even before the election campaign got officially underway, Green leader Natalie Bennett coughed her way through a notorious Nick Ferrari radio interview in which she couldn’t explain how her party would fund the building of 500,000 new homes. Politicians long ago mastered the art of evading the kind of straightforward replies you or I would expect during ordinary conversation, so it’s no surprise that they recycle the same old hackneyed phrases and platitudes when placed on the spot; but their inability to convincingly explain where the money they’re offering to throw our way actually emanates from hardly makes it a great surprise that the public is responding to their promises with a cynical mistrust of what they’re hearing.
On the dependably perennial subject of the NHS, Labour have promised £2.5 billion, which they say will come from a mansion tax, a levy on tobacco firms and ‘tackling tax avoidance’; the Liberal Democrats promise the same as their Coalition partners, though in a laudable attempt to invest in mental health care they’ve gone a little bit…er…well, mental – promising £500 million; the Greens (cough) have promised (cough) £20 (cough) billion for the (cough) NHS, whereas UKIP have offered up a mere £3 billion for it, though one suspects higher taxes on fags and booze won’t figure in raising the money.
As history has shown us, the ambitious spending plans of governments can often be derailed by external circumstances that ultimately render them and their good intentions powerless. What happens in the US or Europe or the Middle East can have a domino effect on the British economy, regardless of every eventuality being taken into account when the new administration’s grand plans are implemented; luck and fate can be crucially overlooked elements of a successful political career. Ted Heath evidently wasn’t in possession of a crystal ball when the Yom Kippur War of October 1973 set a chain of both international and domestic catastrophes in motion that culminated in the curtailment of his time in office, whereas one suspects Tony Blair may have had one stashed away somewhere at No.10 when he shrewdly bailed out a year before the crash of 2008. Or maybe God told him to go.
Last week’s ‘challengers’ debate on the BBC was more entertaining than the one in which Cameron and Clegg figured, if only for the fact that two fewer participants gave the contestants more time to argue with each other. Ironically, Miliband and Farage were united in marginalisation, both playing the punch-bag at different moments of the debate. Natalie Bennett did come across as a bit of a squawking parrot, whereas Nicola Sturgeon again underlined her undoubted talent for forcefully stating her case and Leanne Wood I found to be similarly effective by utilising her gently persuasive Welsh lilt whilst sporting another impressive beehive. But at the end of it, we were none the wiser as to what roles (if any) the five would play in our collective future after May 7.
And if the nation’s piggy bank is as empty as we’ve been constantly told since 2010, whatever riches the respective manifestoes promise to conjure up does suggest the party leaders would be better off auditioning for the Magic Circle than the Cabinet.
Petunia Winegum
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April 21, 2015 at 9:20 am -
£200bn a week? Things must be much worse than I realised.
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April 21, 2015 at 10:06 am -
Oops! A couple of zeroes slipped in there. Rectified!
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April 21, 2015 at 10:35 am -
Reminds me of Enron & other stories.
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April 21, 2015 at 1:40 pm -
Funny. When Enron get involved in creative accounting and spending money they don’t have, people end up going to gaol. When the government does the same thing, it’s “investment in public services” and the acceptable alternative to “austerity” (the latter being, in this case, trying to only spend money you actually have).
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April 21, 2015 at 2:26 pm -
I was reading recently that they are now claiming that Enron was all caused by a faulty Spreadsheet. Blame the IT guy …
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April 21, 2015 at 2:38 pm -
To be honest, that’s almost plausible. An error in formulae early on – and no proper cross-checking – will eventually come back to haunt you.
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April 21, 2015 at 3:01 pm -
Same thing must have happened with the Banks since they were rated Grade A by the likes of Price Waterhouse Cooper just before someone found the vault was filled with scrip.
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April 21, 2015 at 3:51 pm -
In the spirit of certain businesses located 300 miles inland suing BP for alleged losses resulting from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, surely the victims of any spreadsheet error should be able to launch a class action against Microsoft for selling a dangerous software product (Excel) that allows mistakes to be made resulting in financial loss.
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April 22, 2015 at 11:08 am -
The errors are made by the people building the spreadsheets, not by the program itself. I once “inherited” a spreadsheet used for activity forecasting that consisted of a couple of dozen interlinked worksheets. Until I “reverse engineered” it, nobody knew how it worked, because the person who started in had left long previously, but in the intervening years others had added various undocumented brute-force fixes to try to compensate for what I eventually worked out was an error in one formula from the very beginning. That was a fun afternoon….
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April 21, 2015 at 9:21 am -
I’ve thought for a long time that the entire Financial crisis was a consequence of the military adventures in Afghanistan and then Iraq. That was what all the credit lines were needed for and that’s what “the Markets” geared themselves to supply finance for, since “Government Lending” is the line of loaning that always pays out in the end. I cannot see any other compelling reason for why a Labour government gave all our tax money to commercial banks. They demanded the drums of war be played and we had to pay for the minstrels in the end, as always. We pay in cash nowadays rather than in cadavers as in WWI. I suppose it’s a sort of human progress for us… still pretty crap for Ahab the Arab however.
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April 21, 2015 at 12:07 pm -
Just think of it as our sound investment in their oil.
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April 21, 2015 at 12:52 pm -
The soundest investment by the West in oil since the 19th century is Fracking.
See how the House of Saud is reversing 1973. Shake your money.
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April 21, 2015 at 10:00 am -
Cheer up Anna, the UK has a fractional reserve fiat currency system which means the exchequer has, at any given moment in time, the sum of infinity minus one penny to spend. Nobody is suggesting the entirety of that sum should be spent, but some could point out that lack of money, which can be created at will, is a poor excuse for not doing something. there are inflation constraints, of course, but that doesn’t look serious right now. Don’t panic.
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April 21, 2015 at 10:12 am -
The whole business is a scam, there is in reality no national debt. A sovereign government can always print money. The reason we’re told this can’t be done is because it would cause inflation, but these people want it both ways, they tell us there is too little money in circulation and in the next breath tell us printing would cause too much.
The reason the UK Government “can’t” print money is because we are slaves to Europe as my correspondence with the Treasury confirmed:
http://www.financialreform.info/f_r_treasury_non_reply.html
most so-called debt can simply be written off; this is what happened after the Haitian earthquake; the US and other big players turned to the banks and told them simply to write off all the island’s national debt. They did, and the sky is still there. The same could be done with Greece and the UK.
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April 21, 2015 at 10:33 am -
I suspect the banks wrote it off on the basis they would get their money from “the international community”. The notion you can abolish money is specious. Haiti had borrowed the money off America in order to pay it’s debts to France. It even borrowed money from France in order to pay France…. ……
https://globalsouth12.wordpress.com/an-unending-debt/
Nothing like a bit of egalite to give one the liberte to turn a buck for la fraternite.-
April 22, 2015 at 2:15 am -
This money is created out of thin air – the banks don’t actually lend the money, Major Douglas explained this and gave a mathematical proof back in the 1920s.
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April 22, 2015 at 9:49 am -
I promise to pay… is democracy
I promise to make you pay… is tyranny
I promise to spend all your money… is socialism
Perhaps.
One thing’s for sure. Money makes the world go around.
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April 21, 2015 at 10:17 am -
I pushed an urgent note through my constituency MP’s office door last Thursday about an NHS matter pertinent to us oldies about an intention to ‘decommission’ a very valuable service to users of Warfarin. On Monday the first line of a reply letter said he was no longer an MP, since 30th of March. Our chemist didn’t know that either. Neither did several others to whom I mentioned this snippet. Can we survive several weeks with no proper government? Presumably yes, as it’s been done before! This is so they can all swan about and contradict one another, argue,promise this and that. Our voluble Nicola can flash her pink frock and trim figure. Cuddle up to everyone in a rather confusing way. I would rather have my MP there right up to the date, in order to ask some numptie officials what the hell they think they are up to. I know he would if he could….I think. Custom demands he wastes his time and ours making silly offers that cannot be costed.
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April 21, 2015 at 10:22 am -
I noticed on twitter after the dissolution that somebody tweeted Dan Chuck and said could he please remove “MP” from his twit-hamdle..
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April 21, 2015 at 10:29 am -
Quite so Alexander and well said. The true constraint on spending is real resources available to buy in your currency. Natalie Bennett should have told the ineffably pompous Nick Ferrari that given we have the labour and materials available to build 500,00o houses, claiming the lack of a resource that can be created at will, is a bit of a pathetic excuse not to do so.
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April 21, 2015 at 1:44 pm -
It’s all very well saying we’ve got the resources to biuld 500,000 houses, but who is actually going to do the work? A bunch of untrained jerry builders? We just don’t have enough skilled people. If we did have that many skilled tradesmen, what the hell would they all do in five years time once we’d built the 500,000 houses?
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April 21, 2015 at 2:23 pm -
* A bunch of untrained jerry builders? *
I can visualise the series already, “Begrüßen meinem Haustier”.
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April 22, 2015 at 6:49 pm -
Go on the dole, obviously.
Or maybe they’ll happily retrain to do something else, at a cost to themselves.
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April 21, 2015 at 10:29 am -
What is worse, a leader that is so greedy, that they risk insurrection by taking as much as they can get away with; or a leader who is so generous that they spend all your money in order to fulfil maximum contentment, and thus aim to forever pacify the public’s greed?
In other words, who would be the best choice for directing the public economy, a Devil, or a Christ? My belief is that they would both destroy the economy; though the Devil will at least give you the self satisfaction that you were not morally subsumed by the myth of goodness, and so absolve yourself of any blame.
Also, a greedy Devil, who would prohibit other Devils, need only satisfy themselves, and so be self limiting in their profligacies; whereas a Christ would be limited by the wants of ALL the needy, which would give them no upper limit to expenses.
The solution to this quandary, is to separate the economy from the State, as we do the Church. Allow the private sector the free hand to create as much as they want, for their wisdom is evolved through the competition of a free market; whereas the wisdom of a Government based economy, is born of the profligacy of spending without earning.
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April 21, 2015 at 11:49 am -
£8 billion is just over 1% of current expenditure, what’s the problem?
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April 21, 2015 at 1:46 pm -
The problem is that we’re currently spending about £90 billion a year we don’t have.
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April 21, 2015 at 5:26 pm -
My point is that we could easily find an extra 1% from the existing budget, it just requires a minimal change to all the other expenditure. Far too much political fuss is being made over this.
If we were to chop off your £90 billion and spend an extra £8 billion then that would be difficult, roughly reducing total expenditure by an eighth. Not enough political fuss is being made over this.
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April 21, 2015 at 6:18 pm -
It’s true that a lot of things government currently spends money on could go, without real detriment to the life of the nation. The welfare bill will come down as unemployment falls, thus releasing money for other things, for example. I agree that the standard of public debate around the public finances is pretty lamentable.
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April 21, 2015 at 6:27 pm -
Ask Greece, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Italy.
The problem is that every government believes “just another one percent of GDP” for .their pet projects (NHS, windmills, foreign aid, subsidised childcare, bailing out banks) is “not a problem”, especially when the next generation pays for it.
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April 21, 2015 at 12:08 pm -
A very good analysis. The election is all about bribery and wishful thinking. Magic Beans will pay for everything, or soak the rich (who will leave). One thing I am sure about – a Labour/SNP coalition, whether openly acknowledged or clandestine, would be ruinous and break the union. The call for “English independence” would become unstoppable.
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April 21, 2015 at 10:56 pm -
Why wait? Go for independence now… Why would the English people want to subsidise Scotland? Why don’t they go for independence? They don’t because the establishment and the politicians won’t let them. They can’t afford to let Scotland go never mind trying to go down the independence route for England. The UK is no more than a silly construct. It allows England to have a permanat seat at the UN and have nuclear weapons and other such macho strutting on the world stage.
London and the South East would be one area, the midlands another, the north of England etc. etc. spread the wealth and decentralise.
England is such a wonderful country with lovely people.
The argument to leave the EU is the same as the Scots to be independent. We all just want to be in charge of our own affairs. Top down doesn’t work. Localism works best.
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April 21, 2015 at 12:18 pm -
If you think of it in terms of income it doesn’t sound too bad: the nation owes 75% of its income. Compared to most households that isn’t bad. Anyone who owns where they live is likely to owe several multiples of their income.
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April 21, 2015 at 12:22 pm -
How many years left before we have paid for the National House Service and so can finally retire…
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April 21, 2015 at 1:48 pm -
Eh? I own where I live, and I have no debts. Mind you, getting to that position took a lot of hard work….
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April 21, 2015 at 8:41 pm -
Let me guess you are sixty plus?
I don’t want to downplay how hard you worked. I know my parents lives weren’t easy but they could buy a reasonably sized house on one solid income and while it might have taken a working life to payback it was possible. They were in their mid-thirties when they bought that house. It is not in a fashionable postcode and was a newbuild but you couldn’t only just buy it now on two very good professional incomes. This at a time when more and more jobs are not stable regular incomes but more the sort of thing people used to do for a few years before they got something steady.
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April 21, 2015 at 9:09 pm -
“Let me guess you are sixty plus?”
No, I’m not. I took on my mortgage in my mid twenties, and paid it off in my late thirties. Hard work, a lot of saving, some good luck with promotions at work, and no fancy foreign holidays or flash cars.
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April 21, 2015 at 10:03 pm -
Your profile sounds similar to mine – the first key objective was to eliminate any debt, so paying off the mortgage took priority over any unnecessary spending. Once that debt millstone was out of the way, life could start to take on a more pleasant shade with progressively more ‘luxuries’. Later generations seem to ‘need’ their luxuries up front, hence their perpetual debt.
Government is a parallel case. If the debt was paid down, there would then be more annual tax revenue available in every future year for ‘luxuries’, rather than just paying out debt interest for no benefit. Trouble is, the electoral cycle is only 5 years and all the parties need to offer ‘regular sweeties’ to bribe their own target voters, funded by yet more debt, so the cycle continues. Eventually the numbers get so big that the only recourse is to print ‘funny money’, like QE, to buy yet more time, rather than solving the basic problem.
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April 21, 2015 at 1:56 pm -
I must admit to being not particularly happy with the comment by Henry the Horse: “Compared to most households that isn’t bad. Anyone who owns where they live is likely to owe several multiples of their income.”
This is just not true. Nearly all owner occupiers will, by the time they retire, own their homes outright. This is very wise of them, because they will then have to pay no rent from their retirement income, to go on living somewhere – without this, they would probably be paying several hundred pounds per month in rent. In fact, buying one’s own home can be (and should be) viewed as a sensible form of saving for retirement.
The equivalent sensible approach for government is to borrow so little that, when things go sour (through the usual vagaries of economic fluctuation), there is enough contingency (in one’s credit rating) to survive – and preferably to survive going to war too.
Amplifying on Petunia’s worries over the arithmetic of the current level of government borrowing, take a look at this plot of UK government debt since 1700, as a percentage of GDP. It does indeed show that the worst government debt was at the (victorious) end of the Napoleonic War.
Now view the figures from the perspective of UK government inflation adjusted debt per capita (ie per head of population, and in 2005 £s). OK, we are all much richer than we were following 1815, and quite a bit richer than we were following 1945.
But do you fancy defending the nation from an aggressively warmongering opponent, or some other distinctly adverse event, with this as the UK’s national economic starting point?
It’s 4.5 times more government debt per person than when the Grocer’s Daughter handed over the purse and cashbook. Looks like our ‘good times’ since then have been bought pretty much on the never never, and not through sensible hard work and prudent management.
Best regards
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April 21, 2015 at 1:34 pm -
When they started this bidding war I thought, here they come again, bribing me with my own money – but closer to the truth is they are bribing me with my children or grand children’s money.
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April 21, 2015 at 1:48 pm -
Spot on.
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April 21, 2015 at 2:27 pm -
Where do you think the brats are gonna have gotten it from in the first place?
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April 21, 2015 at 3:33 pm -
Even cleverer, they’re going to offer you the chance to buy some shares in Lloyds Bank – you remember, those shares which the previous Government originally bought back in 2008, using some of your money ! So you’re invited to spend some more of your own money to buy again something which you’d already bought with your own money – makes a Wonga loan sound attractive.
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April 21, 2015 at 1:51 pm -
Isn’t the issue with debt & borrowings the ability to keep up the payments without seriously compromising quality of life or being so indebted that lenders get the jitters? On which basis the Greece bailouts were doomed, but it was never about Greece was it?
Regardless of all that, my observation of quite some decades is that all our governments have steadily increased their take of our earnings to pursue objectives few of us would support. I’d be a lot more convinced if our millionaire class political leaders were to commit their own wealth before dipping their hands in my pocket to fund their vanity projects & handwringing expenditure. The plan instead seems to be ‘what’s the most we can squeeze out of taxpayers’.
Re-distribution I understand even if I disagree; what I don’t understand is why taxation isn’t constantly reducing, on the basis of productivity gains from modern technology as in the private sector, and population increases reducing fixed costs per person. We must have saved a lot too from the reduced spending on defence, which I think a fool’s economy.-
April 21, 2015 at 2:22 pm -
What “reduced spending on defence”?
http://www.ukpublicspending.co.uk/spending_chart_2006_2018UKb_30t
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April 21, 2015 at 3:32 pm -
Yeah, in absolute terms it hasn’t fallen, but it has fallen as as a percentage of GDP:
http://www.ukpublicspending.co.uk/spending_chart_1980_2016UKp_14c1li111mcn_30t -
April 21, 2015 at 3:54 pm -
Like all Public Services most of it goes to pay the bureaucrats. The Mail regularly has fun with the fact we have two or three Admirals for every naval ship and a dozen Captains, and more Brigadiers and Generals than we have actual tanks. Imagine the pensions they’ll all be scooping too on their £100K plus salaries. It wasn’t like in Hornblower’s day, if I remember aright the descriptions of the penury he was subjected to when Napoleon was behaving himself.
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April 21, 2015 at 6:28 pm -
I wonder what the Israelis do? I can’t believe they operate with our structures, accepting their lack of overseas presence.
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April 21, 2015 at 9:52 pm -
You need spares, because if one turns out to be crap they need to be replaced PDQ. There were spare admirals and captains in Hornblower’s day – even Nelson spent time without a ship.
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April 21, 2015 at 3:11 pm -
I happen to think that the experiment with austerity has been an economic disaster. I think we would have had much greater growth without it, and would be better placed for paying debt off (relative to GDP).
People who think we are DOOOOOOOOOOOMED are usually wrong. One time I might have gone along with them to an extent, but have grown tired of their constantly being wrong.
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April 21, 2015 at 5:21 pm -
There has been NO experiment with austerity whatsoever, camorons clowns have been borrowing money they cannot hope to repay every second since the last election, just like the government before them and the one before that and the one before that. With savings rates at less than inflation their appetite for issuing new debt will be endless.
So why has their been NO greater growth?
There has been a great effort to rationalise some of the more egregious welfare scams even those have been resisted by the entrenched bureaucracy, the NHS continues to fritter away precious resources, and the never-ending subsidisation of Scotland continues. Talk of austerity is nonsense. -
April 21, 2015 at 6:03 pm -
What flippin’ austerity? Where’s the food rationing, the power cuts, the shortages of petrol, clothing and so on? THAT’S austerity. What we have now is trying not to spend more than we earn year on year, following an almighty splurge of other peoples’ money between about 2002 and 2008 which improved the country – well, how, exactly? We now have to spend a greater sum of taxpayer’s cash each year just to pay the interest on accumulated debt than we do on defence. I damn well resent that.
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April 21, 2015 at 6:35 pm -
I think a Labour politician was recently quoted: ‘Austerity! we’re reduced to drinking Prosecco!’, or some such comment.
I vividly recall the austerity of the late 1940s, but as kids we didn’t know any different so every new treat was special.
Odd that we still managed to get reconstruction under way, set up a health service, and develop nukes then.
Perhaps it’s to do with that stuff they put in the drinking water these days.
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April 21, 2015 at 5:01 pm -
This election campaign is just very, very boring. In fact, I can’t remember being more bored by an election and I am a keen observer of politics.
Cameron is failing to hit any points home and on the verge of begging for a second term, the Lib Dems are hedging their bets, Miliband is just banging on about the wicked Tories, Nicola Sturgeon is fast becoming Hitler in a skirt, the Greens are totally out of touch with reality and let’s be honest, the Welsh are irrelevant outside Wales.
Boring, boring, boring! Where’s all the fire gone in British politics? Where are the conviction politicians? Where are the real policies?
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April 21, 2015 at 6:07 pm -
We’re not allowed real policies. The media would tear them apart. They’d call them ‘Thatcherite’, and deem them a Bad Thing. The general public, on the other hand, might well vote for them….
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April 21, 2015 at 7:07 pm -
I’m suffereing from a surfeit of election coverage, and feel generally limp and unable to raise much enthusiasm these days.
Could this be a case of electile dysfunction?-
April 21, 2015 at 9:56 pm -
What worries me is the apparent acceptance that none of our major businesses, including those which cannot be globalised, like food production and construction, can only operate if the taxpayer subsidises their wages bills with in work benefits. They would, it seemd, all go broke if this subsidy were withdrawn, at the same time losing their internal market if workers or the unemployed who would be the result of massive downsizing could no longer buy their wares. If this is true you have to wonder about the viability of their business models. It’s not just the state which seems to be living on tick.
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April 22, 2015 at 8:31 am -
But from where does the money for all these in-work benefits come from? Taxation and borrowing. Thus, what the said companies would lose in having to pay slightly higher wages, they would gain in reduction of their tax bill. There may not be exact parity for each individual business, but overall the general economy would be better off without having to administer in-work benefits.
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April 21, 2015 at 8:10 pm -
Nicola ‘Krankie’ Sturgeon certainly has more balls than Hitler was claimed to have in the song.
You may not agree with what she says, I certainly don’t, but you have to admire the political stature she has achieved – none of the Westminster leaders can hold a candle to her certainty of rhetoric, that level of passionate politics which seems to have disappeared south of the border. I’m sure Miliband, Cameron, Clegg et al are delighted they won’t be seeing her personally in the House and, at worst, will only have to deal with her old boss.
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April 22, 2015 at 8:07 am -
Isn’t it really the case that the SNP are in a win- win situation?
They can demand anything & to protect the union the big parties will just keep giving.
If the SNP in the end push too far, they get the independence they wanted, with all those negotiated goodies to make it comfy.
Why wouldn’t a Scot vote SNP?
(well you might think twice being a little eu member dedicated to borrowing unsustainably if the troika come calling one day)
They may be crap at running a country but they have access to every Englishman’s purse or wallet.
Maybe with the devolved administration this was inevitable; for the time being I’ll blame Blair.
I think we need to cut our losses, not drag this out.
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April 21, 2015 at 7:39 pm -
Have a look at the national debt clock. If that doesn’t scare the whatsit out of you you haven’t grasped the scale of disaster.
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April 21, 2015 at 9:40 pm -
I’m suffering from a surfeit of election coverage, and feel generally limp and unable to raise much enthusiasm these days.
Could this be a case of electile dysfunction?Wonderful! I have already plagiarised it!!
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April 22, 2015 at 11:25 am -
We bought a dodgy old late Victorian house in 1967, only one we could afford. Woodworm, new roof needed . No hot water. Filthy dirty, damp. Wall plates under the floor boards replaced by us. Bathroom DIY. Kitchen DIY. Walls and roof and chimney work professional. Hard landscaping, garden clearing and planting DIY. Electrics DIY. Husband a qualified electrician in his earlier working life, aerial rigger, ran a shop, nursing. Of course, if over sixty, some presume owning outright easy peasy. Husband now a doddery old gent. Too much wanting to be cosied along by the previous owner or refurber these days, and boy does that cost now. Everything must be just so. Must be able to move in and ‘put your stamp on it’ with a few cushions and fancy blinds. Huge fitted kitchen, we downsized, too much walking to cook. Huge garden, we downsized, too much back straining work. By the way, even getting a tiny mortgage was very difficult in 1967.BECAUSE THEY MADE IT DIFFICULT. So house prices rose slowly. Get it?!!!****!*!*
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April 22, 2015 at 12:25 pm -
We have it from a neighbour that the previous owners of the house we rent, “liked everything just so.” I am constantly finding the results of their cack-handed DIY, which began on the day we moved in, when a floorboard on the landing gave way, having previously been cut through so that recessed lights could be fitted in the hall ceiling below.
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April 22, 2015 at 12:43 pm -
No such thing as a recessed light in our DIY days!!!! They just dangled on a wire. Now in some houses like the milky way.
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April 22, 2015 at 2:57 pm -
I also found out that the previous occupiers’ idea of “hanging lights” was to have a large inverted candelabra in the living room supported by nothing other than its own power cable. It was only when I first tried to change one of the mulitple small bulbs that the whole thing disconcertingly slipped down a few inches!
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