Ealing Southall MP, Virendra Sharma, is never going to be a leader of men. His voting in the Labour leadership election show him to be one of life’s sheep. Baa.
1 David Miliband
2 Ed Miliband
3 Ed Balls
4 Andy Burnham
5 Diane Abbott
Ealing North MP, Stephen Pound called the Labour leadership election right in as much as he voted for Ed Miliband. Clearly he does not like Diane Abbott. He couldn’t even bring himself to rank her 5th. See full details here.
1 Ed Miliband
2 Andy Burnham
3 David Miliband
4 Ed Balls
What most threatens the vulnerable? I’ll tell you. Ill-timed and excessive reductions in public expenditure and investments.
It will be a retrograde step if George Osborne is allowed to run rampant like the reaper of death through benefits and services that ordinary people rely on.
I do not accept that cuts are fair. They are a contradiction in terms.
The BBC’s flagship news bulletin last night had lots of time for LibDem weirdie beardies wringing their hands about the cuts but totally failed to mention the key piece of economic news – the fact that our public sector net borrowing last month was £15.9 billion, see figures here.
To put this in perspective there are 29,160,000 workers in the UK, see figures here. This means that the UK government put £545 on your credit card last month. In the last financial year the deficit was £155 billion – that is £5,316 on your personal credit card. It will be about the same again in the current year, with no changes to your current credit score obviously (find details at https://aaacreditguide.com/ultimate-guide-to-credit-repair/). Even if the dreaded cuts are implemented the interest on this fast accumulating debt is set to rise to nearly £70bn by 2015-16 or £2,400 per annum to be paid by you. Apparently this is not newsworthy.
Always campaigning against obscene profits and obscene bonuses whilst others struggle to make ends meet.
Simon Hughes, the LibDem deputy leader, had a go at the City yesterday at the LibDem conference which gave the BBC the opportunity to pitch in too.
The BBC News at Ten came up with this graphic and the totally spurious comparison of City bonuses with the total cost of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (£2 billion) as a part of a Robert Peston package. They failed to mention that City bonuses are shared amongst a workforce of over a million or 4.2% of the entire country’s workforce. Ooops.
They also fail to mention that the FCO employs 4,385 civil servants. So on average they cost £510,000 per head. A lot more expensive than your average financial services worker. Double ooops. See FCO figures here.
I missed the BBC London Spending Review debate last night. You can see it here.
It was a typical BBC production. Pretending to be balanced while at the same time inserting patently left leaning voices as independently minded people.
The show opened with a hyped 4 minute package on “the cuts”. Talking about London councils’ BBC London’s political correspondent Karl Mercer intoned:
Our research suggests the total of cuts for the next three years could be as high as £2 billion.
Ooops. That is £3 billion or 60% less than their number yesterday and probably double the actual number, see here. Their “research” (read finger in the air) almost certainly does not take into account the effect of some of the smaller grant settlements and certainly won’t account for the fact that a large chunk of these “cuts” will be achieved by rises in service charges.
Some of the people talking were quite clearly stooges. I will highlight a couple in the following posts.
It’s not where the cuts are, it’s who they effect. And at the moment they are affecting more vulnerable people and all the economists are saying that.
Who is this impassioned NHS worker speaking on last night’s BBC London spending review debate? A nurse? A doctor? A senior manager having to make ghastly decisions? Er, no. She is a communications and PR person who works for a London mental health trust.
On the side Brumfitt is a performance poet who has appeared at a number of festivals and even made it on to Radio 4. Apparently she only started work in London in February and already she is on the telly pretending to be a NHS worker. Will the protection of the NHS ensure that people like her continue to have jobs? I hope not.
In her remarks she complains that the housing benefit cap for a single low paid worker in Westminster is “only” £14K and that this compares badly with an MPs allowance of £24K. She is right but so wrong. On what planet can we afford to keep a single person on £14K of housing benefits? Most working young people in London who pay the taxes out of which housing benefit comes pay £500 per month to share a flat in the suburbs and then pay to go into town on the Tube or whatever.
Let me make three guesses about Brumfitt: she is Oxbridge educated (the burning sense of entitlement shines through), she socialises with BBC people, she will appear with a red rosette on a doorstep near you one day soon.
Today the BBC has a piece about how the forthcoming spending review will affect London’s councils. They say:
London councils ‘planning for £5bn cuts by 2014’
Councils in London on average are preparing cut their budget by 24% over three years, BBC London has learned. The 32 local authorities currently spend a total of £22bn and if that is reduced by 24%, about £5bn will be cut from the budget by 2014. This would see jobs go in at least 17 councils and services reduced.
The article is accompanied by the BBC’s nifty new Spending Review logo. Apparently this was going to be a big pair of scissors and use the “C” word until they decided to play with a straight bat.
Either the BBC are being sloppy or their bat is not so straight. The right cuts number is more like £1 billion across London rather than £5 billion. They fail to take into account that education spending, especially the frontline bit, is being protected and that much of council spending is covered by charges, not by government grants and that councils do have scope to increase charges if they wish.
Ealing is one of the biggest councils in London and its savings figure, which will no doubt be achieved is large part by increases in charges as well as cuts, is £53 million over the period, see below. There are 32 London councils (excluding the City of London). Multiply £53 million by 32 and you get £1.7 billion which I suspect is an overestimate in any case as Ealing is so large. Account for Ealing being large and exclude increases in charges and the cuts are more like £1 billion or only 5% of total spending.
The use of the single quote marks in the headline is very strange. Who is the anonymous author quoting. His or herself? Given that the number is total pants are they using the quote marks to give it false authority?
Is the BBC being malign or sloppy?
Ealing Council Leader Julian Bell is often ridiculed by the Conservative group on the council because he once claimed to be a trained economist.
For myself I am not a trained economist, unless you count a grade C O-level taken in the seventies. I can read though and I have a good memory and figures don’t scare me so it is very easy for me to take apart someone who really does not know what they are talking about.
Yes, you Cllr Bell.
This week the Ealing and Acton Gazette published piece from Cllr Bell which underlines how far from any connection with economic reality Cllr Bell is. The piece is a defence of the Labour cabinet’s decision to turf the IMPACT Theatre Company out of their current premises. Cllr Bell uses the “big picture” to justify this move and in doing so comprehensively demonstrates that he doesn’t get it. The next few postings look at some of his statements in detail.
After a couple of introductory paragraphs Cllr Bell says:
Firstly let me say that this was just the first of many very difficult decisions that we as a Labour Council will have to make in the next four years. They are decisions that we would prefer we did not have to make but we are being forced into them by the Coalition government who have embarked on this ideologically driven and reckless plan to clear off the national debt in five years.
Bell’s first mistake is to confuse the national debt (what we owe) with the deficit (how much we are adding to what we owe in the year). In his budget speech Tory chancellor George Osborne talked about eliminating the structural deficit by the next election.
The structural deficit is not the whole deficit but an estimate of what part of it is “built in” and will not be squeezed out by resumption of trend economic growth. The structural deficit is the irresponsible bit of the deficit – the spending your kids’ inheritance bit of the deficit.
In May the OECD reckoned that the UK had the worst structural deficit in the OECD. Not quite sure what is “ideologically driven and reckless” about tackling that! Funny how easily the evil Tories got the lovable LibDems to sign up to their deficit reduction plan. Maybe Cllr Bell is just on the wrong side of the argument?
Does Cllr Bell know what the deficit is? Probably not. In the last financial year it was £155 billion. Don’t glaze over. That is about £5,000 for everyone who works in the UK. Let me repeat, the Labour legacy to the working people of Britain was to borrow £5,000 on each of their behalfs in just one year. In the current year it is due to be £149 billion. Pretty much another £5,000.
Cllr Bell then reaches for his tin helmet and starts making references to the Second World War:
Incidentally by comparison the national debt after the Second World War was a much higher percentage of GDP than we have now and it took until 2003 to pay it off. Did the 1945 Labour government start slashing public investment to cut the national debt? Of course not – it built the National Health Service and the welfare state in the teeth of Tory opposition.
Thankfully our debt now is only a fraction of what is what at the end of the Second World War although it is rising with shocking speed, at a rate of £155 billion per annum (the deficit). But then we had just fought the defining conflict of the 20th century and lost about half a million killed. How can Labour have ramped up our debts so high in peacetime? Whatever you think about the world wars they were BIG. How have a few five-a-day co-ordinators got us to this? It is not as if the Iraq and Afghan wars are what is driving our debt.
Bell is right that we stopped re-paying war debt in 2003 but that did not mean that we had paid off the national debt. Coincidentally it was in about 2003 that Labour started to really open the spending sluices.
Bell is just wrong about public spending at the end of the war; it fell precipitously. It fell as low under the post-war Labour government as a proportion of GDP as it did under Margaret Thatcher in the early eighties. Incidentally the reason that Labour could “afford” to create the NHS is that it merely appropriated the existing health infrastructure from charities and local authorities. Much of the “Tory opposition” related to this appropriation. Imagine if the government turned around today and said we are going to appropriate your pension assets and give you a state provided pension instead. Would you feel that the government had done you a favour or merely stolen your assets?
Finally, one of the main reasons that our exploding debt is so dangerous is the similarly exploding debt service costs. The budget papers showed these doubling in five years from £31 billion in 2009/10 to £63 billion in 2014/15.
Phil Taylor 