Crisis? What Crisis?

It is good to have an alternative view to current orthodoxy. The Herald is a Scottish paper with a declining circulation but it does have good insightful columnists. One of these is Ian Bell who earns his crust writing op ed pieces as well as sporting (mainly football) columns too. His most recent is worth looking at.

"No public spending cuts are needed. None. Public spending cuts are stupid, dangerous, and intended to stuff the throats of the rich. A fraud.

But how could I say such a thing? Didn’t the latest Chancellor call his Budget “inevitable”? Doesn’t that woman on Radio Four’s Today programme speak, morning upon morning, of the cuts “we all know are coming”? And don’t Sir John of Humph and Lord Jim of Naught murmur the chorus?

Crap. The people who live where I live could elaborate. The “crisis”, as we are daily schooled to call it, is an excuse – Ms Naomi Klein may deserve the label’s prize – for the largest transfer of wealth from the public realm to the private sphere since the self-invention of the pickpocket. B******s.

I defer to an old colleague, William Keegan, of The Observer, for this. Last week, Bill remembered an ancient, budget-cutting Government, the one that tossed a whole generation onto the Depression’s midden because debt, in 1932, was 177% of GDP. Today’s figure – less than half of Japan’s – is 61.9%. In Neville Chamberlain’s day, debt interest was running at 40% of state spending. Today, the number is 6.3%.

Keegan had more. The “average maturity” – when the bills come due – of Britain’s current sovereign debt is 14 years hence. The equivalent figure for the United States and Germany is nine years. No-one is calling time, I think, on German rectitude. Yet as Keegan calmly said, “it shows how hysterical the debate in Britain has become”.

Stocks are falling, hilariously, because “the markets” think little George Osborne has taken deficit-slashing beyond agreeable limits. He is his own little crisis. To wit: if the tiny toff destroys the sucker of last resort – you and me, usually – who will stand good for capitalism’s latest cock-up?" Herald on Sunday 11/07/2010

And where does this leave the LibDems? In Islay we are plagued in the summer by Horse Flies which gather anywhere there are animals and, unlike mossies, which are sneaky little critters, bite you openly and with great gusto. They also bring about huge itchy sores. Here's the nub though. They are known locally as 'clegs' and with as much benevolence as can be mustered, it has to be asked,"what on earth are clegs for?" 

Which brings us nicely back to the LibDems and their role in propping up this bunch of slash and burn tories.