The latest balance-of-payments data for the UK demonstrate the plenitude of the failure of Gideon Osborne's purported plan to 'restore' the British economy. The data are the worst ever: imports are up, exports are wallowing and 'remittances to overseas direct investors' are alarming. Those remittances include the tribute that British customers pay to the foreign owners of the gas, electricity, water and railway industries that were snatched from the British public and sold cheaply in order to enable the Thatcher government and its successors show less of a deficit on public spending.
When he took office as Chancellor of the Exchequer Osborne declared his intention to rebalance the economy: away from consumption by the public sector to more private investment, away from a deficit to a surplus on overseas trade driven by strong growth of exports. None of this has been achieved. Public services have generally declined as government spending has been cut and capped. The benefits system has continued to suck in more of the nation's turnover even as benefit payments to individuals and households have been kept in check.
Investment has stagnated. Perhaps most alarmingly, as the government continues to close 'dirty' power stations no new investment has been made in power generation for seven years. Provision has been made in legislation and agreements with companies to compensate the alien owners of power systems for any risk that may remain in new construction [gas or nuclear] - from the pockets of British consumers, of course - but nothing has actually been built: or begun.
Look at the new trade figures, out today. Read what it says about it in the papers.
Then remember Winston Churchill's warning to the USA in 1941: that if Britain's resistance to the Nazis failed the whole world [including the USA] would sink into a new dark age, made darker by the lights of a perverted science.
Gideon and his Treasury team are guiding Britain into a new, darker age. With his own 'good' degree in Economics and surrounded by a like-minded cohort of acolytes he is driving the nation along the path set by the perverse pseudo-science of Economics. He has no idea of the immensity of the responsibility that he carries for this developing disaster. That in no way exculpates him from the damage that he is doing.
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