Posts Tagged ‘Growth’

Why the economy is in far worse shape than Osborne admits

by Michael Meacher.

Osborne’s portrayal of the British economy as having “the fastest rate of recovery of any advanced nation in the world”, which he again repeated yesterday, is sheer poppycock. He continues to boast that GDP growth can be expected to average some 2.5% per annum over the period ahead, but on every key economic indicator that […]

Latest growth figure fires Exocet through Tory claims of economic competence

by Michael Meacher.

The Tories couldn’t have timed it better for Labour. A week before the election the official quarterly growth figures halved to a miserable 0.3%. If this continues at the same level (and of course it may well sink lower still), it would produce an annual growth rate of just 1.2%, no better than the vilified […]

Osborne’s boasts were lies – his was not a budget for a prosperous Britain

by Michael Meacher.

The truth finally came out. Osborne claimed that the deficit was being cut this year when in fact that is only due to the exceptional delaying of tax payments till the end of the fiscal year by the super-rich in order to take advantage of the reduction in the top income tax rate to 45%. […]

Why we should say NO to welfare cuts in the next Parliament

by Michael Meacher.

There is an auction taking place on the size of the welfare cuts to be imposed in the next 5 years. The Tories are arguing for £30bn cuts in the first 2 years to 2017-8 via no tax rises, £12bn in welfare cuts, £5bn in extra corporate tax evasion revenues, and bigger departmental cuts (up […]

Austerity and economic failure to continue

by Michael Burke.

The Tory election campaign is based on the claimed success of the government’s economic policy, as the hype around the latest budget confirms. In reality the Tories’ economic record has been unprecedentedly poor. Their economic policy is not primarily aimed at increasing growth or prosperity but rather at effecting a fundamental change in the economy […]

Why isn’t inequality a central issue in this election?

by Michael Meacher.

Inequality ought to figure much more sharply in this election than it has done so far. The reasons are obvious: the grotesque injustice in the widening gap between the top 1% (and more particularly the top 0.1% and most of all the top 0.01%) and the rest of us; the way that austerity has been […]

Why doesn’t Labour take on the Tories over the economy?

by Michael Meacher.

It is bizarre that Osborne continues to preen himself that the economy is such a strong card for the Tories at the election when in fact every aspect of the UK’s economic performance is looking bad and getting worse. Yesterday it was reported that the growth rate in the final quarter of 2014 was down […]

Investment, jobs, growth must be Labour’s policy, not austerity

by Michael Meacher.

Labour has had a successful party conference, Ed Miliband made a powerful speech with a strong commanding narrative of Labour’s objectives for government, but the only let-down was in the crucial area of economic policy. Ed Balls’ embrace of the the right-wing Tory orthodoxy of prolonged austerity until at least 2020 is as unbelievable as […]

Labour’s economic policy – a lingering attachment to austerity

by Peter Kenyon.

There was nothing subtle about economic policy under New Labour. ‘We are getting into bed with business‘. Fingers to the hoi polloi. ‘You’ve got nowhere else to go‘. People in their millions voted blindly for it in 1997. A significant proportion got wise by 2001 and placed their ‘X’ elsewhere or decided ‘None of the […]

Why does Labour stick to Tory austerity plans the stats show can’t be achieved?

by Michael Meacher.

Osborne’s boast that he would shrink the welfare state to its small scale in 1948 has been definitively scuppered by a report from the Office of National Statistics (ONS). These official figures reveal that there are at least 6 major areas of public expenditure which are currently escalating rapidly and make it impossible to reconcile […]

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