Does the size of the UK national debt scare you? It bloody well should

This Burning Our Money article scares the pants off of me, how about you? Here's the beginning of the article:

'As we've blogged many times, our real National Debt is far bigger than the government officially acknowledges. When we calculated the real debt for the TPA this year, we estimated the true overall total at around £8 trillion, nine times the official total, and over £300,000 for every single household in Britain. '

Here's the conclusion:

'But when you sit down and do some arithmetic, it does look horribly like default is the only real way of cutting the debt as much as it needs to be cut. Default on all those grandiose pension promises made by successive generations of politicos since Lloyd George launched the state pension one hundred years ago.

Never ever trust politicians who claim they can give you something for nothing. Try to remember that in future.'

Depressed yet?

Who are 'the rich'?

Watt Tyler at Burning Our Money explains how taxing 'the rich' may not be the answer to raising money fraom taxation.

Hiding the true unemployment figures

Labour's lies about who has benefited from its creation of 2.5 million jobs are well documented but less well known are the way that it has quite deliberately created a client state of people whose livelihoods depend upon payments from the state. I have remarked upon this phenomena before but an article on Burning Our Money caught my eye today:

'How many of our 6m public sector jobs are just another form of welfare?

The reason I ask is that listening to today's BBC coverage of the continuing debate over National Insurance Contributions (NICs), the question didn't get a mention.

...

This is public employment as welfare. And when we look a the high dependence on public sector jobs in the depressed regions of Britain today, we can see it's more than an empty slogan.

The one slight snagette is that welfare employees still need paying .... Which means that someone else has to part with the fruits of his own labour in order to provide the wherewithal. And all he'll get in exchange is the sight of another new pyramid, or if he's lucky, a government promise to repay the loan in some distant future, probably in debased coinage.

Getting low skill, low productivity, welfare dependents into work is going to be one of the very toughest challenges facing Cam's government. Given the catastrophic fiscal legacy, leaving them on the public payrolls will not be an option.'

IF, and it is still a big if, the Conservatives do win this general election then the exposing of the lies and manipulations that have been at the heart of Labour policy and actions for the last 13 years must be a top priority. The whole country must be made aware of what has really been happening and the culpability of Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and Peter Mandelson in the ruination of this land. Of course I hope that a way is found to have the three of them (and there are others) tried and convicted for their crimes against the UK; an idle pipe-dream, probably but not a total impossibility?

Gordon Brown's poverty trap

"In Gordon Brown’s Britain if you’re a single mother with two kids earning £150 a week, the withdrawal of benefits and the additional taxes mean that for every extra pound you earn, you keep just 4 pence.

What kind of incentive is that? Thirty years ago this party won an election fighting against 98 per cent tax rates on the richest."

That was DAvid Cameron in his recent speech. For more details on this Labour pverty trap please take a read of Burning Our Money.

Confused by the unemployment figures?

Burning Our Money has a great analysis and explanation of how unemployment can be down:

"Conclusion? The next time some government minister or apologist spouts all that stuff about how brilliantly they've managed to stop unemployment rising in this recession, you need to remember two key points:

1. Unemployment has been artificially held down by a wholly unsustainable 300,000 recruitment binge in the public sector - a binge that will have to be reversed after the election.
2. Real unemployment - including the 370,000 growth in the number of so-called economically inactive - has increased by 750,000 in the last year.

Number 10 summed up

“What comes out of No 10 is lots of barmy ideas. It’s the worst possible kind of policy making, which is ‘here is a problem, let’s have a kneejerk reaction to it tomorrow on what we’re going to announce’ and quite frankly the less contact with No 10 the better.”

“All the worst bits of policy making come from the centre. It’s these people who think you change the world by publishing a strategy. And you don’t change a thing by publishing a strategy, it makes no difference whatsoever.”

“It’s no great secret that Gordon is not strategic...a cacophony of silence and confusion... The centre [No 10] is certainly dysfunctional and the Cabinet Office is fragmented.”

“It’s worse than under previous prime ministers. With Blair they did invite you to meetings, but not with Brown. They contracted into a little bunker. I had a very good working relationship with Downing Street under Blair but that changed when Brown came in and it contracted to a very small circle of people. You just got orders from Downing Street, not consultation, and that is still continuing today.”

These quotations form an alarming account of the void at the heart of this Labour government from a group of 60 senior civil servants from across Whitehall. They've contributed to a study by the Institute for Government, and the above are some of their comments.

I wonder if the BBC's ace political expert Nick Robinson will deign to cover this story or will he wait for something for favourable to the Labour party?


Thanks to Burning Our Money for the spot.

Ten Years On - Britain Without The European Union

This is The Taxpayers' Alliance's new cinema advert, I wonder how it will go down? For more information please visit Burning Our Money.

Have Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling screwed up yet again?

Burning Our Money has spotted something of great importance:

"We've just read the government's bank rescue plan. Worryingly, there's no mention whatsoever of those equity warrants we blogged yesterday.

As you will recall, the model we taxpayers want is the Warren Buffett Way. Wily old Warren put his $5bn into Goldman Sachs preference shares - just as our government is now proposing - but also insisted on a big helping of keenly priced equity warrants (the option to buy Goldman shares in future at a price fixed now, at today's firesale levels). So Warren will share fully in any future increase in Goldman's share price. Quite right too.

Darling has just been interviewed by Humphrys, and talked only of taxpayers benefiting from the dividends on the preference shares, not sharing in any future price appreciation. Sadly, Humphrys didn't know enough to ask the warrants question. But somebody needs to.

We should not be pumping equity capital into the banks unless we get a share in the future growth in the banks' value. That's obvious.

Isn't it?"

Don't expect John Humphrys to ask a decent technical question, he is way out of his depth in this area of discussion. It is also in John Humphrys interests for this plan to work it is after all a product (at least in part) of the Labour government.

More government waste

The huge, some might say too huge, £12.4 billion project to overhaul of the National Health Service computer systems has been a disaster from the beginning. This project has been over budget and behind schedule almost from day 1. Now I learn that Richard Granger, the previous head of the project who earned over £270,000 a year, who resigned last year will be succeeded in the role by two people. Christine Connelly and Martin Bellamy will each be paid around £200,000 a year (so increasing the cost to the taxpayer by around 40%). Ms Connelly will be the first Chief Information Officer (CIO) for Health and will focus on developing and delivering the Department’s “overall information strategy and integrating leadership across the NHS and associated bodies”, whilst Mr Bellamy will become Director of Programme and System Delivery, head of the agency called NHS Connecting for Health, responsible for the National Project for IT (NPfIT) to create 50 million electronic patient records among other overhauls of NHS systems.

An extra £130,000 a year is of course peanuts compared to the cost overruns the project has suffered so far. Does anyone believe the project will come in on budget now?

I predict Burning Our Money will cover this srory over the next few days.

Spot the similarity

Many people like to compare the EU with the USSR, maybe there is another comparison to be made. Burning Our Money has the details...

Crime is down?

No it bloody isn't. Read Burning Our Money for the details.

"It isn't working, and it isn't going to work."

"It isn't working, and it isn't going to work. There is a belief that the national programme is somehow going to propel transformation in the NHS simply by delivering an IT system. Nothing could be further from the truth. A vacuum, a chasm, is opening up."

That was the verdict last year of the then head of Fujitsu's healthcare consultancy practice, Andrew Rollerson, regarding the NHS Supercomputer system.

Burning Our Money has a really good article on this scandalous waste of taxpayers money, do read it all.

Gordon promised a “bonfire of quangos”, how has he done?

Unsurprisingly he's been a complete failure at this as at most things. The Times takes you through the basic figures about these "largely unseen and unaccountable bodies spend £101 billion a year, the equivalent of £1,662 for each person in Britain."

More information can be found at the TaxPayers Allinace and I am sure on Burning Our Money soon.

Immigration update

From Burning Our Money comes one of their well researched articles, including this extract:

"As we blogged here, the independent and authoritative National Institute for Social and Economic Research has dredged through rafts of official stats and came up with the following conclusions (based on the Labour Force Survey for Q1 2007):

4.6% of the British population arrived here in the last decade- an extraordinary 2.7m people
Only 20% of arrivals were working in high skill jobs ("professional, managerial, and associate professional occupations")
1.3m were not working at all- ie roughly half of all arrivals
0.5m were not even of working age- ie roughly one-fifth of arrivals were children and old people
So nearly half of all arrivals are not contributing directly to GDP, but they are most certainly consuming public services. Not just schools, hospitals, and social housing, but also our criminal justice system: as we blogged here, foreigners are now responsible for more than half the murders in London, immigrant crime is costing us somewhere in the range £3- £10bn pa, and foreign prisoners are occupying 14.3% of our jail places (end 2006)."


Do read the rest...

More on the Gershon Review

I blogged yesterday about "Whitehall lay-offs, Gordon Brown style" and today I see that Buring Our Money have more to say on the same matter.

At last a blog we can all enjoy

Take a trip to this blog - HMRC is shite and enjoy the truth.


Thanks to Burning Our Money for the spot.

An article on Benefit Fruad that I missed

Please take a read of this from the always excellent Burning Our Money. The figures are well know to many of us but the pathetic levels of punishment handed out to anyone who is actually caught defrauding the taxpayer are scandalous.