In general election year 1970 a last-minute delivery of two US civil aircraft to the UK arguably changed the course of the election. The great issue that year was the adverse balance of payments, and the sudden and unexpected import cost of these two planes was seen to tip the scales against the incumbent government […]
Posts Tagged ‘Deficit’
When will Labour start whacking Tories over their economic policy failures?
Jan 10th, 2015 by Michael Meacher.The Tories’ first election poster depicts a road wending its way through the countryside till far in the distance, with the motif below: continue with the Tory-led recovery of the economy which the Labour party wrecked. It’s a theme which will be repeated endlessly up till the election which Labour, astonishingly, has made no attempt […]
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Deficit nonsense: right, left and centre
Dec 18th, 2014 by Michael Meacher.It is extraordinary that both the main parties have now put forward their plans for meeting the deficit, which is going to prove the centrepiece of the election, yet neither plan carries credibility. Osborne has once again committed the Tories to £30bn of further spending cuts on a rolling 3-year programme, i.e. currently targeted at […]
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How the government’s super-platinum credit card works
Dec 17th, 2014 by Guest.This brilliant, witty explanatory piece by Neil Wilson first appeared at 3Spoken three years ago but is never more applicable Modern Monetary Economics shows us that monetarily sovereign governments (like the US, UK and Japan) are able to spend money before they receive any tax. That’s what puts the ‘fiat’ [Latin for “let it be […]
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Labour views economy through the wrong end of a telescope
Dec 15th, 2014 by Ann Pettifor.“There is no path to growth and prosperity for working people which does not tackle the deficit”. So said Ed Milliband last Thursday. The Labour leader has finally succumbed to a baying media pack that insisted he commit himself to an economic goal set by Labour’s opposition: namely “tackling the deficit.” I am no politician, but […]
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People need hope, not more of the Tory austerity fairytale
Oct 28th, 2014 by Michael Meacher.Ha-Joon Chang in the Guardian is right that “the country is in desperate need of a counter narrative” to the Tory story on the economy. I believe it should go like this. First, Labour did not leave behind an economic mess; the bankers did. Labour was not profligate: the biggest Labour deficit in the pre-crash years was […]
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Cut corporate welfare not people’s welfare
Oct 9th, 2014 by Michael Meacher.Corporate welfare has been estimated in a University of York social policy study to cost British taxpayers nearly £85bn a year. That is not far short of the current level of the entire budget deficit which is still £100bn. If industrial-scale corporate tax avoidance were added in to the corporate welfare state, the cost to […]
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The fantasy of Osborne’s deficit cuts
Oct 1st, 2014 by Michael Meacher.The gap between Osborne’s swaggering rhetoric in his conference speech and the cold reality of the Tory public borrowing figures is almost unbridgeable. The key point, though you would never guess it from Osborne’s bluster, is that public borrowing under his stewardship is now rising, not falling. The ONS Public Sector Finances report for August […]
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Public borrowing under Osborne now going UP
Sep 28th, 2014 by Michael Meacher.The whole point of the austerity programme imposed by Osborne was supposed to be to reduce the budget deficit. The latest data on the deficit however shows a dramatic and disturbing turnabout. Instead of going down, it is now rising, and there are good reasons for expecting this trend to continue. Official data shows that […]
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The Blairites are wrong about the deficit
May 8th, 2014 by Michael Meacher.It’s always good to know that the Blairites are worried because it normally means that Ed has taken another step which will help win the next election. And so it is this time again, with Ed promoting proposals to stop exorbitant rent rises and looking to end some of the privatised rail franchises. In response […]
