Even More Worrying

One rather hopes that politicians always know they are lying, then we know what game they are playing.

But I have an eerie feeling that Gideon our Chancellor of the Exchequer really believes that the basic economic data are favourable for the United Kingdom. He bases this optimism especially on the facts that the Gross National Product is increasing at around 2.5% this year, and that millions of people are doing very low-paid jobs.

Neither of these items is actually good for the economy, or for the people who depend on it.

The gross national product is merely the guesstimated total of transactions in the country: so it is immaterial whether the products that are sold are British made or imported. Provided more is traded at rising prices, or yet more at constant or falling prices, the GNP goes up. So the more people are employed to unpack and to sell imported goods [or to fit imported nail designs] the more GDP and employment go up. But when imports exceed imports by more than 6% of the total national income, as now, that means that a sum equal to 6% of the total reported turnover is owed to foreign producers.
This deficit must be clocked up as additional external debt - on which we have to pay interest - or used by foreign investors to buy yet more control of British companies [whose customers thereafter have to pay tribute to the foreign owners of those businesses]; or dwellings in London that are mostly unoccupied. Either way, in addition to buying more than we import, we have to pay more every year for what was borrowed or sold out in the past. So every increment in the GNP at present increases the country's indebtedness to aliens.

In addition, much of the purchase money for imported goods is borrowed within the UK: so private debt is increasing. Private debt is further increased as people borrow to fund house purchases at rising prices. Increasing proportions of exiguous wages are dedicated to debt servicing, and every added restriction on lending to the poor further reduces their aspirations to enjoy anything like the lifestyle they see others enjoying on the telly.

Furthermore, as had been emphasised by all opposition politicians [including today the LibDems], the national debt to fund government spending within the UK has increased under Gideon's supposedly brilliant custodianship.

So personal debt is up, domestic national debt is up, and debt to aliens is up: and the net result of five years of deleterious reductions of many public services is a disaster. Of course, some areas of government were ineffective and inefficient: so austerity in those areas served the taxpayer well; but the overall net result of cutbacks in the public sector has done nothing to mitigate the economic scene while it has notably devastated the social system.

If it were not so ruinous to the economy in the medium term, one could merely lament Gideon's adherence to the nonsense Economics that he was taught as a student. But as it is so utterly devastating, his delusion will not save him from a reckoning.