Our best last hope
The IFS’s green budget is always a great read, it is good to be able to have something to check the government’s figures against.
But this year’s figures are desperately worrying, the government is borrowing loads, taxing loads and still the state is failing at many, many levels.
The last government’s financial planning was shameless, black holes everywhere, wasted billions on idealogical fantasies, corruption on a huge scale but worst of all long term economic decline.
If growth had continued at pre-credit crunch rates the UK economy would be 36% larger today, it has a worse recovery rate from Covid than our rivals and Brexit has cost 4% of the economy, minimum.
And to balance the books the Tories had to take an ever larger slice of a smaller cake, while decimating the public sector. Hospitals, doctors, nurses, prisons, schools, the armed forces, roads, rail; everywhere you look deep cuts have devastated our ability to function as an advanced economy.
Take investment, last year the government invested 2.6% of GDP, and under existing plans that spending will fall to 1.7% by 2028-29.
That is shameless, we already massively under invest and our infrastructure shows it, how do we stop it getting worse by investing less?
That fall may well be impossible to totally reverse given the mess we are in, but it has to be improved. But we now have two far right wing fools standing for Tory leader, ones who think their big mistake was not to be nasty enough when they were in power, that further huge spending cuts are possible and that tax cuts are affordable.
This is our best last hope to get back to growth, the only other option is to continue our decline, and that decline will accelerate. The consequences will be dire.
Economics, trade and Brexit, not necessarily in that order but the dog always comes first.
By Jonty Bloom Media
I guess it was inevitable that western democracies would face a financial crisis once they had allowed fostered inequality on the present scale. Productivity gains go to the already rich who are adept at minimising tax payments. Many of the biggest companies operating in these countries avoid tax by domiciling elsewhere. The tax burden falls on workers. But the ideology of shareholder value puts constant downward pressure on their employment opportunities and wages and global labour competition exports their jobs. Britain and the US were the big drivers of this ideology. In the meantime with the global economy having become detached from political moorings, we can't respond to the ecological crisis. Nothing lasts forever, but by convincing ourselves of the wisdom of the market, we put our future in the hands of magic beans. Now waking from the spell we find the wizard has chained us up.