The three of them – Darling, Osbourne and Cable – were utterly unconvincing and short on ideas.  Darling and Osbourne were more interested in getting their catchphrases out whilst ignoring Cable who actually came across as the most credible person there which isn’t saying much.

On one occasion, a Scottish doctor in the audience asked if they would guarantee no cuts would be made at his hospital.  Not one of them asked him where his hospital was but answered his question anyway – if his hospital is in Scotland, they have no control of the health budget covering his hospital.  They also talked about social care but failed to mention England once throughout the entire programme.

The Channel 4 poll finished as close as their policies – Darling 33%, Osbourne 33%, Cable 34%.  The Tory Twitterati and bloggers and the Daily Express claimed victory for Osbourne, Liebour and the Mirror claimed victory for Darling and the Guardian (there isn’t a Twitterati or bloggerati for the Limp Dims) claimed victory for Cable.

If the programme proves anything, it’s that the election won’t be won on the strength of economic policy and certainly not by the Chancellors.

Gordon Brown has plumbed new depths of diplomatic incompetence and financial illiteracy with the announcement that the UK will contribute £1.5bn to a £6.5bn fund for “poor” nations to combat climate change.

The pre-budget report this week set out the bleak outlook for the economy – taxes are going up, £30bn of extra pre-election vote buying, tens of billions of pounds of extra borrowing – but the chosen one has found a spare £1.5bn down the back of the sofa in Number 10 to spend on adverts showing drowning puppies and polar bears in the Seychelles.

But setting aside the idiocy of borrowing £1.5bn to give away to some corrupt, third world tinpot dictatorship to spend on guns and gold plated Mercedes, why are we paying one fifth of the amount being pledged in the name of the European Empire when there are another 26 member states who are supposedly out of recession?  No wonder the economy is in such a state when the person holding the purse strings thinks 6½ divided by 27 is 1½.

The British Bankers Association says that the transaction tax is a bad idea.  A spokesman for the communist charity, Oxfam, which receives millions of pounds of funding from the British government, says it’s “a major step towards clearing up the mess caused by their greed”.

Communism has been tried in many forms over the years and has resulted in economic devastation, starvation, war and millions of deaths.  Communism is evil and El Gordo, Obama the Marxist and the EUSSR must not be allowed to inflict it on us.

The chief exec of BA says that revenue was down 13.7% in the last 6 months and next year it is likely to be £1bn less than last year.  On top of this, they are facing more strikes from staff unhappy at attempts to cut costs and introduce efficiencies that might stop BA going bankrupt.  It’s like British Leyland all over again.

Still, there’s some hope of assistance from the British government – a new tax came into force on the 1st of November which will add an extra £300 onto the cost of flights for a family of four to holiday to the Carribean.  The extra cost will mean less people can afford to fly and … oh dear, it’s not looking hopeful for BA is it?

Today’s budget was a proper socialist budget – people who work for a living are going to see their tax burden go through the roof while unemployed people and the dregs of society will be getting money thrown at them.

There’s the obligatory “green” taxation of course – nearly £2.5bn on green measures and a target to reduce carbon emissions by 34% by the year 2020 at an unspecified multi-billion pound cost to businesses and taxpayers.  Like Canute commanding the tide to turn back, El Gordo and Darling will pass new laws to command billions of years of climate change to stop what it’s doing and spend billions enforcing their new laws.  The cost will no doubt be recovered by taking dragging Gaia through the courts for not reducing her carbon footprint to an acceptable level.

High earners will have to hand over half their earnings over £150k in state theft income tax to try and raise a bit of cash to pay for the glorious revolution.  In reality it’ll drive high earners abroad or into the hands of tax avoidance specialists who’ll help them legally launder their wealth through trust funds and limited companies.  Co-incidentally, a cabinet member’s salary is £141k, just shy of the new tax bracket so the only minister who might make be making the sacrifice is Comrade Brown who’s on £194k per year.
Statutory redundancy pay is being increased by £30 per week, under-25′s who’ve been out of work for over a year will be offered a job or training with extra benefits on top of the benefits they get for unemployment and training and an extra 54,000 sixth form places will be created to keep kids in education a bit longer costing the taxpayer money instead of working and paying taxes.

A £2k scrappage allowance is being introduced for people buying new cars and part exchanging a 10 year old car.  The taxpayer will contribute half of the £2k allowance and the car industry – which is asking for bailouts itself and in the case of Jaguar/Land Rover has already been given a few billion by the European Empire – will have to fund the other half.  This will, apparently, stimulate the motor industry.

There’s a 2p increase on petrol as usual, to start in September.  That’s 2p on fuel duty, plus 15% VAT plus the increased price of pretty much everything that you buy in the shops because of the increased cost of transport.

But it’s ok because Darling – whose qualification for running the economy is that he’s a marxist solicitor – says that after a 3.5% shrinkage of the economy this year, the economy will grow by 1.25% next year and 3.5% the year after.  And let’s face it, he’s done such a stirling job this last year and marxists have done a fantastic job of running ruining economies over the years that we could never doubt Comrade Darling’s wise words.

Technorati Tags: Budget, Alistair Darling, Gordon Brown

It was surprising that the Treasury didn’t bail out the Dunfermline because most of its branches are in El Gordo’s constituency.  Not so surprising is the fact that the Treasury is going to take on £1bn of toxic assets, allowing the new owner to take on the profitable part of the business.

The Chairman of the Dunfermline is having a whinge about the Treasury not doing more to keep the building society independent.  The SNP, desperate not to lose another one of “oor banks” (yes I know it’s a building society, not a bank), has offered financial aid to the Dunfermline but the Treasury has apparently blocked the offer.

Technorati Tags: Dunfermline, Peston

The irony is, the Conservatives today announced that they will abolish all the regional quangos if they win the next election, including the regional development agencies.

Today I wrote the following to the four Conservative MP’s in Shropshire (there’s no point writing to the Labour MP, David Wright, any more as he rarely replies and when he does it’s usually spin or he answers a question you haven’t asked) as follows:

When I got home tonight and picked up the paper, Daniel Kawczynski was on the front page again, this time in a similar vein to Mark Pritchard last night. How am I supposed to keep up!

The reference to “Wrekin” is Wrekin Construction, a local construction company that has just gone bust with the loss of around 1,100 direct and indirect jobs. Despite having £40m of orders on its books for this year and enough money coming to them to pay their £2.8m overdraft off by the end of the week, the Royal Bank of Scotland refused to give them a few days extra to pay it. The Department for Business, Enterprise & Regulatory Reform – an English department of the British government – will now have to pay £5m in redundancy payments because the company is in administration. Yet in the same week, RBS pledges to spend £1.7bn on loaning new mortgages in Scotland – as is usually the case: Scottish first, British second.

RBS is, I imagine, keen to reassert its Scottish credentials now that the “English” government owns most of it.  How ironic that the Royal Bank of Scotland is using money from the Bank of England to finance mortgage spending exclusively in Scotland.  How wrong that the Royal Bank of Scotland is using money from the Bank of England to finance mortgage spending exclusively in Scotland.

I wonder whether the Scottish Chancellor had a hand in the decision.  Let’s find out shall we?

Well thank fuck for that because printing a few billion extra pound notes just isn’t an option.  Darling has already handed over £50bn to the biggest banks and £200bn to the Bank of England for short-term loans – we didn’t have enough money to pay for the bail-out in the first place, we certainly can’t afford another one.

El Gordo is quite happy with the outcome of the bail-out even though the banks still won’t lend money and the subsequent devaluation of the pound is causing a double blow to the taxpayer.  In fact, he’s so confident that everything is going swimmingly, he’s planning a Keynesian-style public works programme that he claims will create 100,000 jobs including 20,000 in the construction industry repairing schools.  He doesn’t give any indication as to where he’s going to find the money to pay for the work that’s going to support 100,000 people but then he really hasn’t got a fucking clue what he’s doing anyway so I wouldn’t expect him to have any idea where the money was coming from.

The BBC reporter, Robert Peston, has made another one of his groundbreaking predictions.  He reckons that the British government are going to start guaranteeing bank loans in an attempt to get the banks lending again.

How inciteful of Lord Peston of Threadneedle Street.  Was his prediction based on his in-depth knowledge of business and finance?  Was he tipped off by a Treasury insider?  Or could it be the fact that Alistair Darling announced that the Treasury would be setting up a loan guarantee company with £250bn of taxpayers money back in October?  Still, I’m sure the BBC will make the most of Peston’s “prediction” when the loan company is set up (if it isn’t already).

We’ve seen what happens when a nominally socialist government tries to run a capitalist economy, now we’re going to find out what happens when a nominally socialist government tries to run a Keynesian public works programme.  God help us.

Technorati Tags: Alistair Darling, No Mandate Brown, Reobert Peston, Economy, Keynesianism

RBS had another bumper rights issue as part of the deal with the devil Alistair Darling to get their hands on a few billion more of our hard earned cash. The idea was that they’d get loads of money of the taxpayer and then issue a few million shares to dilute the taxpayers stake in the bank to make sure the UK Treasury was a minority shareholder. Which would have been quite clever if it wasn’t for the fact that the bank is insolvent and the shares quite obviously so high risk as to be worthless as evidenced by the fact that hardly anybody has bought any of the new shares.

The upshot of this is that the UK Treasury now owns 57.9% of “oor bank”. That should please Alex Salmond.

Technorati Tags: RBS, Economy

All of which is good news to those people struggling to pay the stupid mortagages on their stupid houses that they can’t afford to pay.  Assuming, that is, that the banks pass on the full 1.5% rate cut and soon.

Dropping the interest rates is a proven way of giving the economy a nudge when it’s looking a bit poorly and if and when the rate is passed on it might just ease the decline into recession slightly.  It won’t stop it happening, it’s too late for that, but it will probably help.

Of course, it won’t do anything unless the banks pass the rate cut on to us plebs which raises an interesting question – will the Treasury use the golden shares it’s brought in the main high street banks to force a cut in the interest rates if they are unwilling to take the hit on their earnings?

Technorati Tags: Bank of England, Economy, Recession, Interest Rates

All of which means we need to tighten our belts and when I say “we” I’m including the state.  We can’t afford to throw billions at banks but Alistair Darling has done it anyway.  But it might not end there – El Gordo told the world that they’d look at letting banks that have had taxpayers money paying dividends after 12 months after investors told him what a crap investment a bank that can’t pay dividends for a couple of years is.  But then Federal Europe poked its nose in and said that the banks can’t pay a dividend for 5 years otherwise they’ll class the money the banks have had as state aid and then the British government will get fined and the banks will have to pay the money back as a penalty for having been given the money before Federal Europe decided to move the goalposts.

But it’s not just bailing out banks by the Treasury that has got to stop – local authorities spend billions collectively and they need to do their bit to save cash as well.  There was a story in the Shropshire Star last night, next to the story about Daisy the cow going missing (don’t worry, she was later found in farmer Jones’ field), was a piece on Telford & Wrekin council’s accountants warning the council that they’re facing a funding gap fo a couple of big projects.

Telford & Wrekin have committed to part funding a rail freight terminal to the tune of £3.6m.  They intend to fund this by selling council-owned property.  It’s a lot of money but they can comfortably dispose of £3.6m worth of property, even though the property market has fallen on its arse.  But they’re also ploughing ahead with a massive “regeneration” programme from the Borough Towns Initiative which requires an investment from the council of £21.4m to be funded almost entirely from selling property and topped up with a load for about one and a half million.

You can see where this going can’t you?  Shame the council doesn’t seem to be able to.

There are several large house building projects under way in Telford and they’ve all scaled back building to almost nothing.  The council owns lots of land and property that’s ripe for housing or commercial development but the housing market has dried up and companies aren’t splashing out on new buildings because nobody has got any money.  To raise that kind of money through property and land disposal is going to mean selling a damn sight more than they would have done as little as three months ago and in doing so they will have sold assets at a cut down price that will, in all likelihood, return to their previous value in a year or two.

I’m all for regeneration and god knows some parts of Telford desperately need it.  I expect the promised regeneration of the estate I live on is all hanging on this Borough Towns Initiative money but we simply can’t afford it.  The previous Labour administration pioneered the scorched earth policy they seem to have adopted nationally increasing spending, cutting council tax and spending a third of the council’s cash reserves once they realised they were going to lose the next election.  There is very little money in the kitty, the economy is on its knees, the cost of borrowing is high and committing the council taxpayers of a borough with a mere 160,000 residents to £25m of spending on the day the governer of the Bank of England admits we’ve entered into recession is bordering on criminally irresponsible.

Technorati Tags: Recession, Economy, Telford, Bank of England

First of all there’s this one in the Shropshire Star, in response to the council announcing that they’re going to put in average speed cameras on one of the safest roads, relatively speaking, in the borough:

Then there was this deliberately provocative letter in the Scotsman, in response to all the whinging letters about “Scottish banks being given to the English”:

Finally, there’s this cheeky one in the First Post in response to some muppet who thinks the deputy editor of Prospect Magazine will be responsible for the Scots leaving the union because he upset them with an article about RBS:

They should get a few people worked up.

Technorati Tags: Letters, Scotland, England, SNP, Shropshire Star, Scotsman, First Post, Speed Cameras, HBOS, RBS

Landisbanki was nationalised by the Icelandic government last week and its UK arm closed down leaving customers here unable to access their money.

The Icelandic foreign minister has responded to the economic problems there – national debt at 500% of GDP and their top 3 banks nationalised – by saying that their long term goal is now to join the EU and the Euro and get bailed out by the European Central Bank.  No, that’s not a joke.  He said:

In the short term, out defence is co-operation with the International Monetary Fund and in the long term EU membership, adoption of the euro and backup from the European Central Bank.

So what he is, in fact, saying is that the English taxpayer will be bailing out one of their now state-owned banks and then bailing out the entire country if it joins the EU and becomes a net recipient of EU funding.  Not what I would call a good deal for the English taxpayer and if they do go down the route of joining the EU, not a good deal for Icelanders.  Their economy is up shit creek now but if they join the EU their paddles will be confiscated and given to a French farmer to use as kindling to set fire to his fields.  The Icelandic economy was, until recently, reliant on fishing, banking and services.  Banking is a no-brainer from now on, services are looking a bit dubious but fishing will at least let them feed themselves.  But not with an EU fishing quota though – they’ll end up throwing more back in the sea than they take home and that’s assuming the Spanish don’t get the quotas first like they did in our waters.

I wonder if the Icelanders have an equivalent phrase for “out of the frying pan and into the fire”.

Technorati Tags: Iceland, Landsbanki, IMF, Federal Europe

But now the arse has fallen out of the economy and he’s spent a decade’s worth of slush fund on bailing out banks, he suddenly wants fuel prices down.  The one-eyed wonder of wankistan decided to take five minutes off from rearranging deckchairs to feign concern for us peasants who are spending an increasing percentage of our income on electricity, gas and petrol.  Hypocritical twat.

The price of oil is down to almost $80 a barrel but the price of petrol has only crept down ever so slowly and nowhere near in line with the drop in the price of oil.  Of course, El Gordo wouldn’t think about dropping tax on fuel.  Something like 80% of the price of petrol and diesel is tax but why would he care?  He gets a chauffeur-driven limo paid for by the taxpayer.  Thanks to Federal Europe we’re getting charged VAT on gas and electric but why would he care?  He gets his gas and electric paid for by the taxpayer.

Reducing the cost of fuel will give the economy a bit of a kick but it won’t work by itself.  Throwing taxpayers money at banks, paid for by increasing taxes, isn’t going to fix anything.  What is needed is a wholesale cull of taxes and government.  So much money is wasted shuffling round bits of paper and moving money from one place to another when what is needed is to get back to basics.  Government has become like a cancer, multiplying at a terminal rate and spreading throughout society.  Less government, less waste, less legislation, less tax.  That’s a message that will stimulate the economy but until this bunch of faux-Marxists are dragged kicking and screaming out of Westminster, it’s never going to happen.

Come the revolution …

Technorati Tags: Petrol, Fuel Prices, Oil, Gordon Brown, Economy

I kid you not.  The taxpayer is stumping up £50bn now for the eight biggest banks and building societies and another £200bn is being given to the Bank of England for short term loans.  That’s a quarter of a trillion pounds in cash now.  Then a company is going to be set up – presumably along the lines of the DTI’s Small Firms Guarantee – to offer guarantees on £250bn of loans to banks and building societies.

Half a trillion pounds.  In 2006, the purchasing power parity GDP of the UK was $1.93 trillion – just under a trillion pounds at todays prices.  The Chancellor is loaning 50% of the Gross Domestic Product of the whole country to the banking sector.

Official national debt is £512bn.  The Centre for Policy Studies says that if Northern Rock liabilities and state pension liabilities (they’re taking money to pay into the state pension, it should be reasonable to expect it to be paid out) are added to the official figure then it’s more like £1.3 trillion or 103.5% of GDP.  Add this half a trillion on top and national debt is more like £1.8 trillion.  Count the zeroes – 1,800,000,000,000.  That’s 180% of GDP, 22% higher than Japan at the height of recession when banks were failing every few days and they were knocking zeroes off the Yen every couple of months.

What was it El Gordo said about not magicking money out of thin air?

Quite.  So where the fuck did you find half a trillion pounds to give to the banks, eh?  Just to put a piggy bank-raiding session into perspective – half a trillion £1 coins weighs 2,090,000,000lbs.  That’s a seriously big piggy bank.

Technorati Tags: Economy, Recession, Alistair Darling, WTF

Meanwhile, the Bank of America has bought Merrill Lynch for $44bn rather than let it go under. Merrill Lynch said, only a few days ago, that it had 110% of the capital it needed to remain solvent.

AIG has asked the Federal Reserve for a $40bn emergency loan to stave of bankruptcy and has been given permission to borrow $20bn from itself. Not quite sure how that works but it sounds suspiciously like the kind of pyramid scheme that comes back to bite you in the arse when it’s rather inconvenient.

The FTSE fell nearly 213 points on the back of these American banking disasters and shares in UK banks have been badly hit. The Bank of England has responded by magicking another £5bn worth of currency out of thin air to stabilise the banking sector. The problem with this, of course, is that it devalues the pound making imports more expensive at a time when cheap imports start to become more important than exports – an economy in recession becomes more insular. Federal Europe has only put in €30bn (about £23.7bn) to shore up the euro which is unlikely to make a significant difference to the eurozone economy which has been pulling itself apart for a while now but will help to bring the pound and euro closer to parity.

Now is not the time to start buying shares in banks!

Technorati Tags: Economy, Bankruptcy, Recession

But putting that aside, he’s not in a very good position at the moment is he?  El Gordo spent a decade selling the family silver, cleaning out the bank accounts and borrowing the gross domestic product of a small African nation every year to make ends meet.  Now the One Eyed Wonder of Wankistan has got the top job, Darling is left with a set of accounts that would make an Enron executive shake his head and tut in disapproval.

And to top it all off, McBroon is still trying to spend money like it’s going out of fashion in a desperate attempt to bribe people into voting for Liebour.

This week Darling told us, in a roundabout way, that the economy is up the shitter and we’re not to expect things to get better any time soon.  El Gordo then went on to announce that it would be a jolly good idea if local authorities were to spend taxpayers money buying houses that are being reposessed.  This is in addition to their plans to offer cheap mortgages to people who are struggling to get on the property ladder or pay their mortgages.

So where’s the money coming from?  I don’t think Darling has a clue and El Gordo certainly doesn’t care.  The housing market has fallen on its arse, banks and building societies are announcing record losses and we’ve just entered a recession.  Yet the British government is still spending like there’s no tomorrow.  The 2012 Olympics were supposed to cost just over £3bn but the cost has now risen to over £9bn.  The war in Irag and Afghanistan is costing billions with no end in sight.  Federal Europe is fleecing us for billions of pounds every year and the price goes up every year.

There isn’t enough money to support the spending that El Gordo is committing.  Mother Hubbard has just had a quick look in the cupboard and it’s bare.  We’re fucking broke and the Goblin King is still coming out with all these batshit ideas without giving so much as a second thought to the cost.  All those people who nicknamed him the Iron Chancellor must be looking in the mirror every morning and thinking what a dick they sound now the shit is hitting the fan.

I can’t see Darling putting up with this for much longer.  The number two job has turned out to be a steming pile of number two and it isn’t going to get any better.  Assuming they aren’t cancelled in the interests of national security, there will be elections either next year or the year after.  Liebour stand about as much chance as a ghosts fart in a force ten gale of winning the next general election so Darling has two options – either tough it out and firefight as best as he can until the next election or resign before things get much worse and let someone else dodge the bullets.  My money is on the latter.

Technorati Tags: Alistair Darling, Gordon Brown, Liebour, Economy, Recession