Saturday, December 8, 2012

Question Marks hang Over The Heads of Cameron and Osborne's Fitness To Run This Country!


Left to Right
Danny Alexander, George Osborne and David Cameron
Pictured in the House of Commons Last Wednesday 5th December 2012
After Announcing a series of measures that are going to cripple this country and cause utter misery, low living standards, homelessness to thousands.
These Blithering Idiot Multi-Millionaires Think It Is Funny!

Regarding George Osborne's Autumn Statement last Wednesday.

When the shadow chancellor, Ed Balls gave his response to George Osborne's autumn statement in the House of Commons last Wednesday, it was obvious he was having a problem controlling his stammer. David Cameron, Nick Clegg, George Osborne, Iain Duncan-Smith and Danny Alexander are well aware that Mr Balls has a stammer, instead of behaving like adults and allowing him to bring it under control they began heckling, barracking him, laughing at him and deliberately making it as hard as they could for Mr Balls to get control, and in doing so encouraged their respective back bench MPs to join in the heckling and sneering. In the normal rough and tumble of politics, Ed Balls, can give as good as he gets, however mocking someone with a speech problem is not part of the rough and tumble of politics, it is cruel, insensitive and profoundly disgraceful and not behaviour fitting of a prime minister, chancellor and other front bench ministers. The aptly named "Mr Speaker" (John Bercow) should have intervened, he too is aware of Mr Balls difficulty, but he stayed cowed and silent and let this disgraceful farce continue, one wonders if he had his orders from the Tory whips office prior to the statement?

 Mr Balls showed great courage and tenacity as he battled on and eventually won through. All David Cameron and George Osborne and the other front bench ministers showed is that they are just a bunch of rude, out of touch, immature over privileged feckless "arrogant posh boys" about as statesmanlike as "Comical Ali"and just as totally unfit to hold high office!

What kind of example did Cameron, Osborne and Alexander set with their disgraceful behaviour to the many young people who watch parliament, among them many people young and old who may have speech difficulties? Don't bother trying to overcome them because in the end even the people charged with running the country will sit back and mock and jeer at people's attempts to get on and overcome difficulties? Utterly appalling behaviour.

I think anyone who has difficulties like this and chooses to speak in public and on TV and radio etc, like Mr Balls does is extremely brave and I hope the disgraceful scenes they witnessed last Wednesday do not affect them in any way, thankfully the vast majority of the British public are more mature than our current leaders!

The chancellor delivered a dreadful indictment born out of a catalogue of his economic failures. Announcing a further year of austerity and a real terms cut in statutory maternity pay, and cuts to pensioners tax allowances. The House of Commons Library research shows that women are four times more likely to be adversely affected  by Osborne's latest austerity measures than men, and the poor and vulnerable are being disproportionately affected by austerity as their whole income is used in a hand to mouth existence in order to survive. Any freeze or less than inflation rise is a real terms cut in their income.

For the record George Osborne is paid £134,565 per year by the tax payer, he has a lucrative taxpayer funded expense account which means he pays for very little in his life, free food, shopping, phone, electric, gas and internet bills etc. He also has a £4 million Trust fund. On his taxpayer funded expense account he recently made £1 million out of flipping his taxpayer funded country house, paddock and "room for a pony". When quizzed by a HoC Select Committee over his expense claims he failed to declare that his taxpayer assisted country home with an acre of land included a paddock, his excuse for not declaring the paddock is because he said: "It didn't have a horse on it".  George Osborne who is destroying peoples lives and jobs etc and who is making the poorest in society pay for the sins of his greedy Tory doning, tax dodging banker mates, has the bare faced cheek to claim that "we're all in this together"?

Ever since they assumed the roles of unelected prime minister and unelected chancellor, David Cameron and George Osborne have been on an agenda to encourage hate and ridicule towards the poor in this country from day one of their unelected government.

Right from the start they embarked on a divide and rule strategy,  I pointed this out from the very beginning and wrote about what I thought their deliberately divisive tactics would do to society and it is all coming true and only lately, have the press began to pick up on it! How can George Osborne who has taken over £100,000 of taxpayers money, flipped his second home and made £1 million and banked £450,000 profit, even have the nerve to imply that other people are "scroungers"? Most people on low incomes do what they have to do to survive and feed and clothe their families and keep a roof over their heads, George Osborne flipped his taxpayer funded country mansion in acre of land purely for financial gain and has pocketed his £1 million profit and added it to the millions already sitting in his bank accounts.Incidentally Osborne hired a firm of accountants to get him and his siblings out of paying inheritance tax on their millions, and he talks about tax dodgers?

Cameron and Osborne have deliberately targeted people on welfare in order to push through their harsh austerity measures, they have done so by publicly ridiculing the unemployed and those on benefits, inferring that they lie in bed sleeping all day with their blinds down while others go to work. There may be a few like this, however Osborne and Cameron know fully well that for the vast majority this is a blatant lie and is patently untrue. Perhaps if the PM and chancellor stopped watching Jeremy Kyle on day time TV while thy are supposed to be working and got out more and met real people, they would learn that the majority of people just want a decent job, with decent pay so they can support their families, these people are not "feckless, workshy scroungers", they are people searching for jobs, many of whom have been put out of work by the government which is now attacking them for being unemployed!

Some of the biggest welfare scroungers in this country are the Conservative supporting multi-national companies who could afford to pay their staff a decent living wage but instead pay them the barest minimum, or slightly above the minimum wage. These huge companies payrolls are being heavily subsidised by the taxpayers as their employees are paid low wages, the state has to step in and top their pay up in order for them to survive. In April next year, may people who work hard for low wages are in for a really nasty shock which many of them do not realise is going to happen. Iain Duncan-Smith the Conservative work and pensions secretary, is going to be cutting working families tax credits. If they do not work extra hours (which may not be available), if they do not work 16 hours per week and cannot find an extra part time job, then the government will be cutting their tax credits, which will make it harder for them to survive, harder for them to get to work and harder for them to keep their families - what happened to "making work pay?" Alterations to the tax threshold will not make any difference to them as many do not earn enough to pay tax on their part time earnings any way!
It is no coincidence either, that ever since assuming power Cameron and Osborne and the entire cabinet made up out of both Tory and Lib Dem ministers have been busy trying to drive down workers pay and conditions, to make it easier for the multi-nationals etc to hire and fire as cheaply as possible. These companies have been doing a lot of hiring of two part-time workers, instead of one full-time worker, as the Government have made it cheaper for them to do so with the national insurance contributions (NICs) anomaly, where it is cost effective to hire two part-timers rather than one full time worker. This is one of the reasons why unemployment has been falling in a recession, instead of rising and why there has been a huge 50% increase in the number of part-time positions. These are the cheap inferior private sector jobs that the Tories keep mentioning are being made, they are not proper living wage full-time positions.

Then there is the government's work programme which forces job seekers to work for multi nationals full-time for absolutely nothing! If people refuse then they are sanctioned with the withdrawal of their job seekers allowance, once again the taxpayer is funding private sector multi-national companies like Tesco, Poundland, Argos etc payrolls, selling them our labour for nothing, the reason why this is done is because while many thousands of people are being forced to do this their names are taken OFF of the unemployment register (confirmed by the Office national Statistics), which in turn is making unemployment look like it is falling when it isn't. Not only this this government are wasting millions of pounds of taxpayers money on recruitment companies like A4e, who have been found to have been fiddling the books, their CEO, Emma Harrison and friend of David Cameron's has been forced to resign amid fraud probe of her companies concerning over £200 million of government contracts. yet still the government are handing them contracts and now these companies have been finding less than two people in every hundred permanent jobs and are being paid millions to do so.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) has announced that Osborne's latest austerity measures will hit the poorest 40% more than the richest 10%.

Osborne and Cameron's measures also hit the 60% of people actually IN work, proving that their claims that they are onside of the "strivers" are totally false, another great big fat lie from the Tories.

I am sick and tired of the dreadful "arrogant posh boy" behaviour, the blatant lies, the twisting of the truth and all the deliberate misleading from both Osborne, Cameron, Clegg, Iain Duncan-Smith and the entire cabinet. The entire autumn statement was meant to deliberately deceive and the whole thing was a charade and a cheap conjuring trick, an illusion, which is currently unravelling.

The Chancellor's borrowing announced in his autumn statement was lower than all the economists thought it would be, the reason for this is because he pencilled in the sale of 4G licenses. What Osborne did not explain in his statement is that this sale hasn't actually happened yet, so what he has pencilled in is something he "hopes" may happen. What happens if the sale fails to produce the projected sale price? It may make more, it may make less, we have as yet no way of knowing, but this is a gamble being taken by Osborne and all his gambles with the economy, peoples livelihoods and predictions for growth so far have failed abysmally.

Osborne should not be using the money from 4G sales to pay down the debt, in order that it makes him look better politically, and he hopes, increases the Tories chances of re election. IMO, he should be using that money on building much needed houses to tackle growth by creating jobs and kick starting the construction industry which has fallen off a cliff thanks to Osborne's austerity measures. the construction industry has fallen 10.8% since Cameron and Osborne took charge of the British economy! However, once again we see Osborne is putting himself and David Cameron's political aspirations and re election hopes before the needs of the entire country.

Osborne also used a sleight of hand over Quantitative Easing (QE) to make it look like he is borrowing less than predicted! Basically, the Governor of the Bank of England has created new money electronically (QE) and  used it to buy government debt to then inject the money into the economy,he then put this money this on the BoE balance sheets, George Osborne then asked for it back and he then promptly transferred the interest it receives to the Treasury balance sheets; which Osborne then used to falsely reduce the level of its borrowing. It's like us getting a load of Monopoly money and paying it into our accounts through the ATM, it will look good on our accounts for a while until its  time to total and balance and then we will be left with a black hole in our accounts, much the same as the £27billion black hole George Osborne has now created in his accounts and as time passes this will not get better, it will get worse, there is only so much "funny money" can do and the day of reckoning is getting ever nearer, what then?!

Osborne has based all his accounting on the figures and forecasts of the Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR) which Osborne himself set up and which is supposed to be independent of Government (yet it never is). Worryingly for us the OBR has never got a single forecast right, how can it, when it in turn bases its calculations on Osborne's economic trickery and on money that simply isn't there and never actually existed?

Osborne is lying to the House, lying to the public, misleading the public and causing nothing but fear, chaos and confusion through his complete incompetence as a politician and a chancellor. He is causing very real damage to the lives of poor, vulnerable, unemployed and disabled, all those least able to withstand his trickery, slurs and vile untrue allegations. He is now causing fear and damage to those Ed Miliband refers to as the "squeezed middle" and all the while this is going on he, David Cameron, Iain Duncan-Smith, Danny Alexander and Clegg are sitting there sniggering, jeering, laughing and treating the whole thing like one big joke, not giving a twopenny damn about who they are hurting and whose lives they are destroying, quite frankly, I have never witnessed anything like it in this country, ever before. What on earth type of people have running this country? When things got bad during the crash and global recession in 2008, did we see Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling etc, sitting there laughing, joking, giggling and sneering and jeering after having to deliver life changing policies to the public? Have you ever stopped and thought that if we did not actually have Gordon Brown, Alistair Darling and Ed Balls etc in power then, what an unholy mess this incompetent feckless arrogant lot of Tories would have caused us? This Government couldn't even get the figures right in the Government and South West trains contract. Two damning independent reviews have concluded that Government cuts and a botched reorganisation and seriously poor management of the government Department of Transport, have all contributed to "unacceptable flaws" in deciding who should run the main railway line between London and Scotland. This botched rail contract fiasco by the government at the Department of Transport is going to cost the country at least £100 million to correct and some economists are putting the true cost nearer to £400 million.
Even more alarming the minister who was part responsible for this fiasco is Philip Hammond and is now Defence Secretary in charge of the defence of this country, he has recently decided to stand down almost the entire armed forces over the Christmas period to make up for the fiasco this government caused in security at last summer's Olympic Games! He is also in the process of sacking thousands of troops leaving the country unable to cope should there be a terrorist attack.  Justine Greening who was also part responsible has now been moved and she is now in Overseas Development Secretary busy concealing her predecessor Andrew Mitchell's "dodgy" Rwandan deal. (Andrew Mitchel is the minister who shouted, screamed and swore at police protection officers in Downing Street and referred to them as "fucking plebs" who should "know their fucking place".)

Railways are not the only fiasco either, it is every single policy from this government of u-turns, granny tax, caravan tax, skip tax, charity tax, forests, books for children, school milk cancellation, schools sports programme  to the ridiculous cancellation of the previous Labour government's Building Schools for the Future programme. This programme when it was cancelled by Education secretary Michael Gove was warned that it would adversely affect the economy and leave us short of the number of schools required for the future, he wouldn't listen, and this is exactly what has happened and now this ludicrous government have had to perform yet another u-turn and reintroduce another school building programme and still they refuse to admit they got it wrong. It's not just the inconvenience and the damage to the economy they caused but it actually cost this country over a £1 billion to cancel and now they have to go back and spend that money again, that's a billion pounds lost to the economy, think what a billion pounds could have done for schools right across this country! There is also the "bonfire of the quangos" fiasco. This government have sacked hundreds of thousands of civil servants and in many of the departments where they used to work, the offices have been left seriously understaffed and unable to cope with the workload, so ministers responsible for the sackings in their departments are now forced to hire in staff from agencies to carry out the work and this is costing the country quadruple what it would have cost if the civil servants were not sacked in the first place and in a further ludicrous twist to the story, in many cases it is the exact staff who were sacked by ministers who are being hired from agencies and brought in to do their old jobs! It is exactly the same as is happening in the NHS, this government have forced the sacking of thousands of nurses and now hospitals are so short staffed they are bringing agency staff in at quadruple the cost and yet again in many cases these agency staff turn out to be the nurses who have been previously sacked! This government are also forcing the terminally ill to work for nothing and if they refuse then they will have their benefits stopped, where is the compassion and the sense? Honest to God you couldn't make this stuff up!

The only excuse David Cameron and George Osborne have when questioned on their terrible incompetence is bizarrely they try and blame the previous Labour government for this governments abject failures. How can it be that this government think they can blame world events for their own ever growing list of utterly disastrous total failures, but still maintain that the Labour government was the cause of the global financial recession, the international banking collapse and infer that Labour was responsible for the collapse of the Portuguese, Italian, Irish, Greek and Spanish economies and trying to scaremonger that the British economy would go the same way if we did not elect them (the Conservatives) to government? We have a Tory controlled government now, have they made things better? No, Cameron and Osborne have made them a thousand times worse and if they are not stopped then there is going to be catastrophic consequences for this country in the very near future as well as the coming years! How can this government accuse Labour of waste when they themselves are wasting billions of taxpayer money on error after error after error? At the very least when we had a Labour government we had a vastly improving NHS, education etc and the Labour government actually cared for and looked after the e welfare of the people in its care, what have we now? An incompetent administration wasting billions on incompetency and driving down the living standards for everyone in the country except for the rich and it is beginning to have catastrophic consequences.

How can Cameron and Osbonre accuse the previous Labour government of profligacy when in 1997 Labour inherited a debt of 42% of GDP from successive Conservative governments, however, by the start of global banking crisis in 2008 the debt had fallen to 35%? That is, Labour had reduced the debt by 22%! How is this waste? Yet during the banking crisis there was Osborne and Cameron trying to deliberately make things worse by intentionally talking down the British economy and causing fear and chaos with their scaremongering, travelling the country and the world telling everyone that "Britain was broken" causing the stock markets to dip over a debt of 35% which was actually 22% lower than the 42% Labour inherited from the Tories in 1997, did Labour say back then the sky was falling in? No, of course they didn't, they got on with the job of reducing the debt without thrusting the country into recession and causing unemployment to rocket!
I remember this time well, day after day, week after week, month in month out for about 2 years we had the Tory supporting right wing press, bully Gordon Brown, blowing things right out of proportion and making the whole thing worse, blaming Labour for every little thing, it was totally ridiculous. Yet despite all of this the Labour government managed to get this country through the worse *global* recession for 100 years, got unemployment falling again and returned the economy to growth.

If the Tories really want to play the blame game then the roots for the UK banking collapse were first laid down in Margaret Thatcher's tenure as PM when she single handed decimated British manufacturing, destroying coal mines, the steelworks and ship and car building. It was Thatcher who deregulated the banks and made this country solely dependent upon the financial sector. It was Thatcher who caused the North South divide, almost destroyed the NHS and state education and then sold off gas, electric and water to foreign investors, something we are all paying the price for today in soaring utility bills. It was under the Tories that we had Black Wednesday, it was under the Tories we had interest rates of 15.9% causing bankruptcies, negative equity and home and business repossessions. It was Thatcher who insisted on introducing the poll tax (against all advice, just like what is now happening to the NHS and welfare) which cost this country billions and forced people to pay money they simply did not have, which subsequently caused the poll tax riots. It was under the Tories that underemployment reached 3 million officially, but everyone knows that due to the Tories fiddling the unemployment stats by removing people from the unemployment register and placing them on long term sickness benefits, unemployment was put nearer 4 million as a direct result.

It is actually the Tories who mismanage the economy each and every single time they get the chance and they are doing exactly the same again right now!

Labour left the economy in recovery and warned the Tories repeatedly that they would harm the recovery if they cut too far, too fast, Cameron and Osborne with their eye on re election in 2015 refused to listen, they began implementing known failed Thatcherite policies and this is exactly what has happened, they ruined the economic recovery which was underway when Labour handed it over to them.

The mess we are in today is not because Labour spent money investing in the NHS, education, roads and railways and thousands of extra nurses, midwives, police, teachers, troops, or building over 149 brand new hospitals and thousands of new schools, refurbished schools, well equipped schools etc and the banking collapse wasn't caused by nurses, midwives, doctors, teachers, police, lolly-pop ladies, dinner ladies, Teaching assistants etc, it was caused by greedy Tory bankers gambling with our money.

The reality is that Cameron and Osborne aided and abetted by their Tory supporting editors who run all of the right wing press, told blatant lies to the public, lied about the facts, lied about their capabilities, told lies about Gordon Brown, worked on innuendo and disinformation in order to get into power, they did not manage to fool everyone which is why they were short in the 2010 election, so they purchased the number of Lib Dem MPs they required to run which can only be termed as some kind of fascist but totally incompetent government, who refuse to listen and who are governing in a truly idealistic and dogmatic style. they know their insane measures are not working but they refuse to change direction, which not only makes them incompetent, it makes them criminally negligent and they are failing those most vulnerable, the poorest, the elderly, the terminally sick and the disabled and the unemployed, they are dividing society and turning neighbour against neighbour, employed against unemployed, able bodied against disabled, couples against single parents etc, in short we are all now living in a society that couldn't give a damn about anyone else, cameron and Osborne have divided us as a society and turned parts of society into the nasty parts, just like the Tories are known as the "nasty party" and it wasn't Labour that called the Tories that, it was their very own Home Secretary, Theresa May when she was in opposition. They have us hating each other, resenting the unemployed and blaming immigrants for every thing that goes wrong, this government are stirring up a hornets nest of seething resentment and it will in the end implode, it always does.

Since when has it become a crime for a government to spend money on its people and to look after its people, provide them with warmth, sustenance, education and quality health care and hire civil servants and public sector workers to deliver all these things? If you read through my article, you could not help but see how it is the private sector that is bloated, inefficient, and far more costly than the public sector. It is the private sector that is bleeding the state dry, through subsidies, low wages and tax dodges and who are completely unaccountable for the billions of pounds of taxpayers money they receive and which finds its way into the bank accounts of the shareholders etc and now our beloved NHS is going the same way towards privatisation and 'unaccountability' as the railways did when the Tories privatised them! Why is it such a bad thing to have a government that governs for "the many not the few" and delivers a caring society fit to live in, jobs, and a safety net?

The very simple truth is that this country was in recovery and returned to growth when Labour handed it over to Cameron and Osborne in may 2010 and it isn't now.

We have had the longest double dip recession in history and after a brief respite due to the previous Labour government bringing the Olympics over and putting in place the major infrastructure required, we are now on course for a triple dip recession and the economy is due to contract yet again. this isn't just down to global events, as many countries in Europe and the rest of the world are now beginning to recover strongly, just like the UK would have if we had the courage to stop listening to the lies being force fed us by Cameron, Osborne and their mates in the right wing press.

This Tory controlled government of utter incompetence are in the process of destroying the NHS, education, police, defence and welfare. They are making sweeping changes in every major part of the infrastructure of this country, they are wasting £3 billion in reforms of the NHS which nobody wants and they have already wasted countless billions on their failure to get to grips with their own policies. What gives them the idea that they are fit and proper enough to carry through these major reforms when to date they have failed and fluffed every single policy they ave tried to introduce?

How does this bode for the change over and implementation of the  Health and Social care Act in the NHS? And the welfare reform bill next year to Universal Credit? The government have already been warned that the IT system they have in place for the switch over next year will fail and will be totally unable to cope or process claims. Millions of people are going to be left without food and without heating and many will lose their homes, many more will be unable to get to work because they will not be able to get there. Yet this Tory controlled government are once again refusing to listen to people and we as a country are on cause for a head on collision with utter catastrophe.

I honestly do not believe that the country can cope with another two years of this dreadfully incompetent government, yet thanks to Nick Clegg's and the Liberal Democrats total support of everything Tory, we are being forced to go down that road. How long before this country implodes under a blanket of buffoonery, nastiness, spitefulness and utter, utter Tory incompetence?

God help us, we are being driven into a brick wall by a pair of attention seeking, marauding, incompetent, arrogant feckless public school boys, for those of us who remember how bad things were under Thatcher and Major, this lot do not even come close, they are much much worse!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

You are absolutely right, Gracie, but unless the Liberals walk away from the Coalition (to reposition themselves closer to Labour) we are stuck with these bastards and their legacy for years.

Good article by Will Hutton in the Observer today.

Terry

Gracie Samuels said...

I read the article by Will Hutton - excellent.

You are right about the Lib Dems too, if they fail to walk away we are stuck with them, even if they do walk away this government have fixed it so they could limp on being a lame duck government.

What a sorry state of affairs the Tories have made of this country!

Gracie

Dave of Stoke said...

Why is nobody in the house of commons asking questions about the profits made by Mr Osboure on the house he sold, which was paid for pay the public purse.