“Why has he prioritised giving £5 billion to the banks?
The Chancellor wishes to avoid debate on some of the key issues facing our communities. Let me raise one of those questions, which was totally neglected last week in the Budget.
The Chancellor received representations from Action for Children, the Local Government Association and Barnardo’s on the crisis in children’s services.
Sir Tony Hawkhead, chief executive of Action for Children, has said :
“children’s services are on an unstable and dangerous footing. We’re calling on the Government to prioritise the services children need before this crisis turns into a catastrophe”.
As Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer John Mcdonnell points out often, it is now quite clear that saying the UK would “end up like Greece” without punitive, callous, degrading Tory Austerity was either painfully stupid or the political and economic equivalent of falsely shouting “fire!” in a crowded theatre. Since 2010 the Conservatives have intentionally run down and sold out the UK’s economy so as to sell their political Austerity agenda.
Whilst doubling our debt and refusing to invest in the country the Tories have constantly referenced the ‘economic catastrophe left by Labour’. China is the powerhouse of the shifting global economy – as Donald J. Trump often pointed out during his election campaign – so, how did the debt profile of the UK at the end of the last decade compare with China? Very, very well. So well that it’s almost as though the Tories haven’t got a clue about managing debt & growing the economy.
China’s debt has quadrupled since 2007. Fuelled by real estate and shadow banking, China’s total debt has nearly quadrupled, rising to $28 trillion by mid-2014, from $7 trillion in 2007. At 282 percent of GDP, China’s debt as a share of GDP, while still considered manageable, is larger than that of the United States, Germany, the UK or, indeed, Greece.
The Tories would often make wild claims about how we were going to be ‘like Greece’ if we didn’t fall for their political agenda : Economic Self Harm & Self Sabotage Pending Privatisation.
Clearly, Austerity is a political policy, not an economic policy – so what happened? Much like the recent post EU referendum events where the right wing of the Labour Party followed the adage of “never letting a crisis go to waste” by inexplicably trying to blame the EU referendum result on Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, so too did the Tories repackage the Global financial crisis of 2008.
The whole nation was sold the frankly ludicrous line in the 2010 General Election that Gordon Brown somehow crashed the global economy by building too many schools and hospitals in the UK, an island off the coast of Northern Europe. Not enough of the British people believed that in 2010 to give David Cameron the victory, so Nick Clegg and his Liberal Democrats fig leafed the Tories into power, foisting them on the country.
In 2015, the Tories had to resort to #ToryElectionFraud to gain a parliamentary majority of 12.
This means the political policy of Austerity, designed to punish those the tories see as their enemies – Doctors, nurses, teachers & other public servants, as well as the poor and disabled – has been imposed on us for 7 years now without a proper, clear democratic mandate. As if that were not bad enough, it is also clearly the wrong economic strategy to have adopted.
Our nations debt profile under the Tories has gotten worse, not better, precisely because we cut the meat, the flesh and bones, from our economy at exactly the time we were and are one of the best placed countries to invest in itself using borrowing.
Supposedly the Tories are seen as a “safer pair of hands” with the economy than The Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn & Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell, who unlike the entire Tory front bench, actually has experience of balancing a budget – as he did as keeper of the purse strings at the Greater London Council.
Given their record, it is difficult to fathom why that still is.
“What was in the Chancellor’s mind when he prioritised giving nearly £5 billion to the banks rather than plugging the gap in children’s services for those most in need in our society?”
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