The joke's on Brown

Zoo keeper (Elephant House)

"When leadership is entirely driven by a search for tactical advantage, plain speaking is a sin".

Jeff Randall.
D.T.
1st April 2010.

Dehdinif Ruobal

After all those business leaders coming out in support of Tory policy on NI, Stephanie Flanders' article adds the extra icing on the cake for the Tories. It's wonderful to see Mandelson in such a panic. Labour really is coming out with a load of nonsense!

mongoose

Halving the deficit leaves the debt to grow still larger.
We need to run a budget surplus to "pay the debt down".
When will that happen?

oldrightie

Not just in April, Sir.

sandy

I watched a young blogger representing the Tories on Sky tonight talking about ,amongst other things,"The(financial) mess we are in."

Not for the first time it occurred to me that the Tories need to labour the point, at all times over the next few weeks,that it's not "The mess we are in" as if it all happened by accident,but "The mess that Labour has put us in."

With Labour's friends in the BBC continually trying to blur the lines of accountability, as in "they're all as bad as each other." Tories need to hammer home the point,over and over,that the economic catastrophe that threatens to overwhelm us was created solely by Brown's New Labour Party.

chris as usual

Richard will explain why this is good for Labour.

Red Rag

I take it by your publications total commitment to Team Cameron your publication is as described by the real Tories as being one of their Toady Press.

Nick

Despite the overwhelming support for the Tories from the country's biggest employers Newsnight had only two people on their program talking about the NI cuts.

A Cambridge academic who only wanted to talk about Vince Cable. And Mr Waterstone of the eponymous bookseller, a past Labour supporter, who insisted the NI cut was bad because it meant an inevitable hike in VAT. He didn't seem to think that the already £167bn deficit didn't seem to demand a VAT hike so why does the NI cut need a VAT hike ?

Richard

I see you use the same photoshop man as cameron uses on his posters....hope you haven't paid him yet!
It all seems to me a bit like asking for an endorsement for Ferguson from Man United fans..a forgone conclusion.
Funny how only three days ago the words of the IFS were being bigged up by the tories yet their opinion on the reversal is now kept very low key as they say it's a folly for the tories to think their funding is adequate, and focus diverted from debt repayment is wrong.
Still another day another battle.....still a very long road, all up hill for the tories to climb.
Cameron has a knack of taking two steps forward and three back....on that note tomorrow should be a good day.

2trueblue

Maybe at last people are willing to see what a lot us have known for ever, Liebore always ruin the economy.

Major Plonquer

As always, I agree with Richard. The Tories are making a big stink about Labour's government waste - which only Labour can reduce.

For example, there's the story about how Labour has pissed away £2.8 billion through fraud in the Tax Credit system - including over £10 million pounds paid to people who are dead.

Well, smarty pants, just because people are dead doesn't mean to say the don't have to pay their taxes what with the new Labour Death Tax. And if they pay their taxes then they'll be eligible for tax credits. All they have to do is go to their nearest government office and fill out a 28 page form. Labour will be opening tax offices in cemetaries up and down the land to make it easier for the dead to (legally) claim their tax credits.

And if, however unlikely, there is a Second Coming and the Lord Jesus rises in England over Easter he will be eligible for a substantial tax refund - providing, of course, he has a proper visa.

Andy H

Richard. Why do you bother - you're neither funny or intellectually coherent. You would be better off hanging around labourlist mate.

chris

The picture looks like a villain straight out of a Batman movie/TV show: The Joker? Gordon, if the IMF or the Local Authority in Kircaldy won't employ you after the election then head to Hollywood! It was a good career move for Charlie Chaplin, Stan Laurel, Alfred Hitchcock and numerous others!

Rainer Unsinn

"Richard
I see you use the same photoshop man as cameron uses on his posters....hope you haven't paid him yet!"

Why do Labour luvvies perpetuate smears? Anyone with a pair of eyes (yes, even those that don't go to specsavers) can see that the original was not photoshopped, that was done by the mydavidcameron crew.

Major Plonquer
Perfectly correct. What's more, they have the right to a postal vote. The needn't worry about filling it in, either, Labour will do it for them.

paulg

Richard@ I enjoyed your mataphor......still a very long road, all up hill for the tories to climb.

It is indeed, but unfortunately for labour their slipping down the slope like an avalanche - picking up momentum.

You seem to sit up late writing comments, you need to go to bed earlier, your suppose to be doctoring peoples feet! or doctoring something anyway?

Dirty Euro

Maybe M& S should say what schools and hospitals they would like to close down.

TrevorsDen

"Maybe M& S should say what schools and hospitals they would like to close down." --- typically thick from dirty euro.

Darling identified 11 billion of inefficiencies in the budget. So why perpetuate them for a year? And of course they do not include closing down schools and hospitals

Your claim is absurd - Tories have said they will ring fence the NHS; mind you the govt themselves are preparing NHS cuts just to keep within the current budgets.

DavidL

The absurdiy of the poltical arguments grows. A tax cut (which in fact is the cancelltion of a tax rise)costing £6bn is unfunded: unforgiveable!
Do the politicians not know that we know that the whole Health Service and Eduction budget put together are unfunded? All of it paid by borrowing from our children. The Tories are right that a tax on jobs is particularly stupid but for goodness sake look up: how are we going to get out of this mess?

emil

Meanwhile Brown is caught red handed taking the VAT exemption for Haiti single out of the wider aid budget (tumbleweed at BBC, but all hell let loose if a nasty Tory had performed such sleight of hand) and it emerges that in 1996 Brown , rightly, considered "NI a tax on jobs", all documented in Hansard. (ditto).

Schools and hospitals worked in 1997 DE but I'm afraid that most sane people have rumbled this sorry, sorry shambles of a government.

Ian C

Suggest that the serious minded who understand economics (not Richard, among others) read today's article in the FT by David Roach and Bob McKee (both of Independent Strategy - they called the credit crunch in 2007) entitled "Watch out for sovereign debt black holes."

A couple of extracts;
"Our own calculations show that the budget deficits of crisis-struck countries now equal more than 25 per cent of global savings and 50 per cent of savings within the OECD. And the increase in debt ratios is on a different scale because it simultaneously affects all the big economies, not just an Argentina."

"This means rich countries will lack a dynamic core to help them grow their way out of their debt spiral by boosting GDP. Indeed, if growth falls below the yields on their bonds, these countries will become sovereign black holes in the universe of credit, with uncontrollable upwardly spiralling debt levels." We already have GDP growth of perhaps 1% and 10 bond yields of 4%.

"The majority of government debt must be owned by domestic investors, not by foreigners. And it needs a fat excess of gross domestic savings over investment needs, which yields a current account surplus. This keeps the currency strong and makes low domestic returns look good relative to those of foreign assets.

None of the big credit crisis-stricken states has any of these strengths today."

"Creating new sovereign borrowing to finance another thriftless consumer binge and more asset bubbles is no way to achieve sustainable growth. Unless immediately addressed, the excess of sovereign debt will be the next chapter in the credit crisis."

This is why Osborne is right and the Tories should be elected. An increase in NI will help stall any recovery. If it has to be replaced by VAT it will encourage savings - something that needs to increase exponentially if we are to get the UK back onto a growth path. Allow Labour back in and we are done for and the credit crisis will revisit us immediately. This time there is no remaining capacity for fighting it.

Simon Stephenson

What I'd like to ask people like Richard, Red Rag and Dirty Euro is how they factor in the positive effects of cancelling an area of expenditure so that they are able to conclude that this decision would be a "bad thing"? Let's take, for example, a decision not to go ahead with the building of a new hospital. This doesn't just create the comparable situations of:-

1. A world with the new hospital

and

2. A world without the new hospital

What, in fact, it creates is this comparable situation:-

1. A world with the new hospital

amd

2. A world without the new hospital, but with the resources required for the construction of the new hospital still available for allocation elsewhere.

So, Richard, Red Rag and Dirty Euro, how with such a minuscule amount of study and calculation can you be so adamant that the cancellation of any particular piece of public expenditure is in overall terms such a bad thing? Is it always the case that a public expenditure project represents the optimal use of the resources required, and does nothing ever happen over time to change the calculation of optimal use of the resources?

michael

If you are quoted company with 0.5 million employees eg B&Q the proposed tax increase could cost you c. £70,000,000.

There have been 12 equivalent rises during this administration,s term.
That's an annual wage bill increase now standing at...£936,000,000.
Having probably been paying an average of...c.£800,000,000 pa for the last 5 or 6 years,
at 15 k pa that's 50,000 jobs...no joke.

The last 6 0r 7 years may well have seen over 1/2 a billion kept off the balance sheet. With the resulting questions raised by fund managers; no doubt themselves under pressure from their 'poorer' pensioners.

Tyranosaurus

Give numbers to three decimal places is a well-known trick for numbers you've just made up - if it comes back to you with the same three decimal places you know its still your made up number and no-one has checked it through

David Sterling

Brown is absolutely desperate and will use any fictional figures to make a false claim. However, as any good Auditor will explain, to shave 1% or 2% from an annual budget of over £700 million is easy and will certainly compensate for G. Osborne's plans on preventing a NI tax rise. Businesses must be allowed to grow to bring this country out of recession.

Michael Booth

The joke is Brown.

michael

Numbers based on £3 per week per employee.

2% employers contributions in 97-----15% in 2011 .

I am not privi to balance sheets so figures are speculative. There again the adding up is not rocket science. Neither are the conclusions.
I am purely demonstrating how these small amounts are cumulative and over time have a huge impact on growth for EVERY employer.