Budget Deficits

The budget leaked, and all our money drained out.

Call me a ponce. But I sometimes enjoy sushi for lunch. Recently I treated myself to some from Itsu. If you don’t know Itsu, it’s quite nice stuff, maybe a little downmarket compared to Nobu, but definitely one up from Sainsbury’s grab and go.

I had a ‘Salmon Full House’ (626 calories). I think it was about £9.

Not cheap. But it certainly wasn’t the most expensive salmon I paid for this week. That cost me, and you, a whopping £700 million.

Because that’s how much the Environmental Agency has just forked out to save some wannabe sashimi from getting sucked into the nuclear inferno at the exciting new, over budget, and behind schedule, (obvs) Hinckley Point nuclear power station at, er, Hinckley Point.

And if you wondered how many actual salmon you can save from irradiation for £700 million and guessed ‘lots’, then guess again.

The on-site Oppenheimers reckon these eye wateringly high sums will only protect 0.083 fish per year.

Or to put it another way. Your government is spending £700m of your wages to save one solitary salmon, every twelve years.

As my delicious lunch shows, it’s not even as if salmon are endangered. So protecting them, at any cost, makes zero sense.

It’s like the government spending hundreds of million of pounds of tax payer’s cash to rescue some chicken wings from KFC.

But not to worry, our spendthrift government has got money to burn.

Your money.

And now it’s got even more of it.

Last October, after getting elected on a solemn promise not to put up our taxes, Labour Chancellor Rachel Reeves stood at the dispatch box, and put up our taxes.

And then, after promising, hand on heartless, that honest Guv, it was a one time thing, a desperate emergency measure, to ‘fix the foundations’ and fill a ’black hole’ the nasty Tories had left, pothole-like, bang in the middle of the economy, she swore that she wouldn’t come back and do it again.

And then last week she came back. And did it again.

Of course we now learn that Labour was lying to us all along.

There was never any ‘black hole’, it was as fanciful, make believe, and fabricated as Reeves’ own bogus CV.

The details of Reeves’ deception might seem complicated. And no doubt the government will attempt to spin this as some wonkish spat over process, fine print, and detail. But it’s not really.

Essentially the OBR handed Reeves some figures. The Chancellor lied about what those figures were. Then used that lie as justification to put up working people’s taxes, so she could then spunk an extra £15bn on welfare payments for the unemployed, and sickness benefits for the sad. Plus benefits for unemployed foreign nationals, and newly arrived ‘migrants,’ who are currently signing up for Universal Credit, at the jaw dropping rate, of over five hundred new claimants a day.

(As an aside I wanted to double check just how much we are spending on benefits for foreign nationals, (currently £1bn a month-so that’s essentially Reeves latest tax rises spent right there), so I put the phrase ‘benefits for foreign nationals uk’ into Google.

Instead of headlines ranting on about how much they were costing us, as I expected, I was greeted instead by pages and pages, (topped of course, by the government’s own gov.uk site), explaining to foreigners, exactly how to go about making a claim.)

Don’t be fooled. This is not economics. This is ideology.

Rachel Reeves did not make a mistake. She made a decision.

A carefully thought out decision, to siphon money from the far left’s enemies. Workers. Business owners. Landlords. The self employed. The self reliant. Savers. The wealthy. The vaguely wealthy.

And shower it on their clients, dependents, and voters. Those on welfare. Those claiming sickness benefits. Unemployed migrants. Asylum seekers. And salmon.

(For context, the £700m it will cost to ‘save’ those fish is about twice as much as the OBR predicts will be raised by Reeves’ pernicious new ‘mansion tax’. At least until next time. When it is inevitably extended to include those with ‘the broadest shoulders’ living on your street.)

There’s a word we use when someone engages in deception to extract money from people.

It’s called fraud. And it’s a crime.

There’s no question that if you or I were caught lying, in order to fleece money from the government, we could expect to end up in court. And rightly so. Why then should it be otherwise when our own government does it to us?

Before budget day, Reeves claimed she would

“deliver the growth that means living standards can improve and we can properly fund public services”.

Then stood up at the dispatch box and droned her way through the most pernicious, wealth destroying, aspiration-crushing set of measures in living memory. All with the pizzazz, panache, and personality of a broken fridge.

What you have, she wants. What you earn, she’ll take. What you create, she’ll confiscate.

This budget wasn’t was a plan to build an economy.

It was an instruction manual detailing how to destroy one.

Despite Kier Starmer’s limp protestations that he is ‘laser focused’ on hot Ukrainian boyz ‘growth’, the only thing that could conceivably grow our economy, is doing less of what Rachel Reeves is doing, and more of what she isn’t.

Sucking the very life blood out of the nation, Reeves is the political equivalent of Lyme Disease.

But Rach is quick to inform us that no, the real problem isn’t that she’s a truly terrible chancellor, a pretend economist, is addicted to spending other people’s money, or simply can’t add up.

Nope.

It’s that men keep telling her things.

Bloody men!?!! 😡

“I’m sick of people mansplaining how to be chancellor to me.”

Moans poor Rachel, adopting the popular progressive’s trick of reframing all criticism as bigotry.

It seems that Reeves can’t do her job properly, (and surprisingly there’s actually going to be more to this sentence), what with all these awful male men wandering about all over the place, making sexist sounds, with their misogynistic gobs.

It’s an affront. Our esteemed lady chancellor (the First of Her Line dontcha know? Oh you did know. Because she never shuts up about it) is doing her level best to Girl Boss the economy off a cliff, but annoyingly she has to contend with all manner of awful male economists, bank bosses, statisticians, and experts, lolling about the Treasury, mansplaining to her how numbers actually work, and wot not.

What’s a girl to do?

But not to worry, our Rach is made of sterner stuff. And even though “boys who now write newspaper columns” have put a ‘target’ on her back, this strong female character assures us she won’t let them win.

‘I’m not going to let them bring me down by undermining my character or my confidence. I’ve seen off a lot of those boys before and I’ll continue to do so.”

Yaaaasss Qweeeeen!

Now don’t get me wrong. I have no objection to talented women taking on the great offices of state.

Over the last century a full one third of our female prime ministers, (ha ha. No, not you Theresa), and one hundred percent of Britain’s actual Queens, have been absolute titans.

And I’d like to see the lads match that kind of hit rate.

But imagine for a moment the uproar if a leading male politician had dismissed Labour’s pinch faced, bowl-cut sorority house, the coven of calamity which comprises Rachel Reeves, Yvette Cooper, Lucy Powell, Shabana Mahmood, Lucy Nando’s, Bridget Phillipson, and the increasingly awful Jess Phillips, as an unbearable bunch of battle axes, a frumpy harem of ever nagging ‘girls’.

They would lose their job.

Immediately.

“Talk to me with respect’

Reeves nasally thunders

I’m the Chancellor of the Exchequer,”

But are you tho Babes? Really?

One moment Reeves adopts for herself the ridiculous cosplay costume of ‘Iron Chancellor’, staunch, unyielding mistress of the nation’s finances.

The next she’s a blubbering, bleary eyed wreck, slumping at the dispatch box like a drunken octopus, apportioning blame for the nation’s misfortunes on everyone, and every thing, from Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, and Nigel Farage, to The Tories in general, and Liz Truss in particular, to Brexit, War, the Markets, Alan Carr, and a vengeful Cthulu.

In fact pretty much the only thing Rachel Reeves hasn’t blamed for the disastrous state of the British economy is the person in change of it.

Rachel Reeves.

When Reeves is not accusing someone else of ruining the economy she’s so diligently eviscerating, she’s assuming a wholly unconvincing posture of economic prudence.

Vaingloriously lauding her own self restraint, as she moans on about how she is being unreasonably forced to live

“in the world as it is, not in the world as I might like it to be”.

A moments contemplation however, and it becomes clear that the very idea that Reeves, or indeed any of the rest of Labour’s bonkers, cut-the-cockles-off-kids-to-be-kind crew are living in anything approaching the real world is beyond preposterous.

In fact they’re lying to us so often, so habitually, so stridently, and about so many things it sometimes makes you wonder who they actually think they are.

The BBC?

And now we know that Reeves’ excuse, that she was just responsibly responding to the sage forecasts passed down to her by the state’s captured number cruncher, was just another barefaced lie.

Not that the OBR has ever gazed into its wonky crystal ball, and come back with an even vaguely accurate prediction.

Labour might be living in fantasy land, but the OBR’s reliance on using mass unskilled migration as the main driver of growth is about as credible as plucking a long term economic plan from the pages of Harry Potter.

A least in Harry Potter, Dumbledore and the gang are realistic enough to recognise that the Death Eaters have come to destroy their way of life, not grow Hogwart’s GDP.

Yes, yes I know. ‘Not all Death Eaters’

That’s probably enough for today. After all, who knows how this story will develop in the next few days?

And since this is likely to be her last week in office, (Who am I kidding? I see that the BBC and the rest, already seem to be closing ranks-just imagine their non stop, eye popping rage, if a Tory chancellor had been caught lying like this), let’s leave Rachel Reeves with one final, self indulgent, moan.

‘You can see that in the media; they’re going for me all the time. It’s exhausting’.

I tell you what’s really exhausting Rachel. Going to work every day and having your wages, your livelihood, your assets, and your kid’s inheritance, confiscated, taxed, levied, and stolen.

And for what?

Fourteen disastrous Tory years, and two calamitous Labour budgets later, Britain is no longer a viable nation.

Instead, we are bequeathing our children little more than a giant welfare state, shackled in a tragic suicide pact, to a universal, if barely functioning, health service, both of which have been thrown open, at taxpayer’s expense, to anyone, from anywhere in the world, who simply turns up.

After last week’s car crash budget, a defiant Reeves stood firm, informing journalists that they ‘would not write my obituary today.’ And for once she’s right.

Thanks in no small part to her own ineptitude, mismanagement, and lies, Grub Street will be far too busy over the next few weeks and months, writing a completely different obituary.

The obituary of Britain.

The ultimate irony of course, is that after all the equivocation, exaggeration, and falsehoods, Reeves did somehow manage to will her famously imaginary ‘black hole’ into existence.

Only for it to become a lie so big, it literally swallowed her up.

Now can we please have our money back?

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That’s it until next time. Hopefully I can get the chance to write again before Christmas. I know, right? Gulp.

Special thoughts and prayers this week for the friends and family of Peter Whittle, who we lost since I last wrote. Peter will be very much missed.

ATB

LSO