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Why won’t Labour tell the truth?

'Gideon' OsborneWhy does Labour, when the Tories lie and lie and lie, keep on turning the other cheek? Hardly out of an excess of Christian charity, more because of cowardice in failing to confront the British people with the truth. Osborne, a snake oil salesman if ever there was one, began his time in office in 2010 by repeating over and over again that all the problems in the economy were all the fault of the previous Labour Government. So why didn’t Labour make the obvious riposte that it was actually the bankers, whom Osborne for some reason had somehow forgotten to mention? Why, even more worrying, has Labour failed to make even a bleep to counter these Tory lies over the whole of the last 4 years? It would have been so easy. The biggest budget deficit in Labour’s 11 years before the crash in 2008 was 3.3% of GDP whereas the Thatcher-Major governments racked up deficits bigger than this in 10 of their 18 years.

Now the snake oil trickster keeps saying with the same inane repetitiveness that the government has a long-term economic plan and it’s working. Both partsd of that statement are laughable, but as Goebbels knew all too well, if you keep on saying something long enough and your opponents never refute it, a lot of people will come to believe it. So why doesn’t Labour tell the truth? The silence is surreal. To have a real long-term economic plan one needs export drives, investment and a new model of growth that does not depend on consumer debt. The opposite has happened. The balance of payments deficit is going through the roof, investment has still not recovered to pre-crash levels, and and the government’s only hope of growth is by pushing consumer debt close to £3 trillions!

Everything that Osborne promised in 2010 has turned to dust. He promised then that the deficit would be cut by this year to £40bn; it’s now £100bn and even rising. Investment in the non-financial private sector has been a disaster area: it stood at £43bn in 200g, halved to £21bn in 2009, then fell by a further third to a shocking £14bn, less than 1% of GDP, in 2013. As for the Tories having nothing to do with failed debt-sodden splurges of unsustainable growth, they are now actually glorying in just that, viz Funding for Lending and the housing market going gangbusters.

But of course the government does have an economic plan, though not one that they would ever breathe a word about to the public. It’s a short-term plan to keep the economy going by any means possible till election day, after which the shutters come down hard. Do you buy that?

4 Comments

  1. Rod says:

    Labour won’t counter the Tory diagnosis because Labour is intending to offer more of the same Tory medicine.

    The Red Tories would need to offer a real alternative if they were to actually tell the whole truth about the UK’s economic problems. They much prefer attempting to salvage whatever’s left of neoliberal credibility.

  2. Barry Ewart says:

    Absolutely bang on Michael! Tell a big lie often enough! People just need to look at the evidence from recent history – Lehman Bros, Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae et al and sub prime lending. Unfortunately for the Tories history keeps throwing up more EVIDENCE – JP Morgan Chase fined 13b dollars in the US for their role in sub prime lending, City Group fined £4b July 2014! EVIDENCE!

  3. swatantra says:

    The trouble was that it happened on Labour’s patch, and in a weird way the public will always blame Labour for 2008, and nothing, nothing will persuade them otherwise. But because the Tories still haven’t cut the deficit as the promised in one term, they’ll get the blame for that, so in a way it balances out. Thats why we’re heading for a hung Parliament, and there’s nothing, nothing we can do about it.

    1. Rod says:

      “we’re heading for a hung Parliament”

      That’s the good news.

      A hung Parliament is best way to prevent more New Labour lunacy.

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