Thursday 22 January 2015

EU take the money as Cameron's lies get found out on UK Budget deficit

The Public Borrowing numbers for the UK in December are grim. Instead of the forecast £10 billion of borrowing ( a mere £333 million a day, natch) the actual number has come out at £13 billion.

Oh dear, so far, so bad. Except that £2.9 million is the EU payment made because we have a strong economy of drug dealers and hookers (I knew there was something positive driving all this immigration!).

This is the announcement when made last year that Cameron and Osborne led them to protesting too much that the UK would 'never pay' and it was 'unacceptable.' Everyone else pointed that as a member we had to pay, so we would.

And Lo, we have.

It's a sad end to the Coalition that after 5 years of Government they have averaged only a 1% reduction in the deficit a year and increased payments to the EU.

Nil points.

6 comments:

BE said...

And most of the deficit reduction has come from tax rises!

I expect a nice 2 point bump in the VAT rate around June, whoever fails to lose the election.

Having said that, the coalition has done good work on business taxes, and should be applauded for that. The recovery would be even more insipid, and thus the deficit would have been even higher, had George not done some clever fiddling. On spending the coalition has been like a drunk Gordon Brown, on other stuff it has been an awful lot better.

And Ed M, well, he would be a bloody disaster.

So, 3/10 for the coalition.

andrew said...

One thing is sure :

No matter who wins, the other side would have been even worse.

Budgie said...

Cameron is just so transparently incompetent - good at pr but hopeless at getting things managed properly.

The economy is superficially looking better but the deficit is bad and the debt horrendous. Cameron should have prioritised: first the stuff that really needed to have money spent on it, then the next in priority, and so on until the money ran out. Then he should have stopped spending.

DJK said...

In the great scheme of things it's small change, but he should also not be doling out transparent bribes to pensioners, like the 4/5% pensioner bonds.

Seriously addressing the budget deficit would mean making tough choices: reducing pensioner benefits, NHS spending, tax credits, etc. Instead we've had five years of putting the problem off, with huge unspecified spending reductions pencilled in after the next election, or the election after that.

Clive said...

@ DJK

"In the great scheme of things it's small change..." -- you're absolutely right of course, in money terms it is small change. But in messaging terms, it's a powerful kick -- and not a good one. In essence, it says "we'll buy your vote". Middle class (even well off) pensioners == ok, yes, we like you. The lower orders, "people on benefits" (ahh... if only everyone realised how many that really included, not least a lot of the aforementioned pensioners), local authorities == bad.

You can be two faced, ideologically speaking, only for so long before even the least observant voter can smell something.

Electro-Kevin said...

Tits !


Oh sorry. That was my submission for the Question Time thread. (Page 3)