Gordon Brown: financial fucking genius

Bodger and Badger concentrate really hard, but still struggle, whilst attempting to understand basic economics. The pair of ignorant, fuckwit cunts.

Oh, look! As predicted, the money's running out and so our fuckwitted Cyclopean Prime Minister and his equally lackwitted Chancellor—or, as I like to call 'em, Bodger and Badger—are going to solve the problem by putting us all further into hock.

The blow to tax revenues from the credit crunch is set to send the Chancellor plunging £16 billion or more deeper into the red over the next two years than he has planned, calculations for The Times indicate today.

The estimates of the toll on tax receipts by the National Institute of Economic and Social Research will aggravate the acute financial headache already facing Alistair Darling.

With a general election expected as soon as next year, the Chancellor is already boxed in. A still deeper slide into the red would leave him with little scope for pre-election giveaways or for extra tax and spending measures to help to stave off a recession.

The institute calculates that the severe economic and financial impact of the credit crunch will mean that the Chancellor has to borrow an extra £8 billion in the present financial year, 2008-09, and another £8 billion extra in 2009-10. The £16 billion total is the equivalent of adding nearly 4p to the basic rate of income tax.

Oh, fucking well done: thank you so fucking much. I mean, it's only money, isn't it? I mean, what's another £16 billion, eh?

The answer is, of course, that it's peanuts compared to the massive amounts of cash that NuLabour have splurged so far. This topic is covered regularly and extensively by Burning Our Money...

We start with the official National Debt—Brown's figure, as published by the Office for National Statistics and charted above. When last sighted [PDF] (figures up to Dec 2007), that was £536.5 billion, or 37.7% of GDP. So still within Brown's 40% rule.

But...

We first need to add PFI debt. According to HM Treasury, its discounted present value is now £91bn, but since that ignores this year's new commitments and all payments beyond 2031-32, we'll round it up to £100 bn (see this blog), of which a mere £5bn has been counted in by the ONS.

Next, we need to add the liability for those unfunded public sector pensions (eg see this blog). According to the latest estimate from the IEA, that's another £1,025 bn.

Then we have the cost of decommissioning our old nuclear power stations. That's an explicit taxpayer liability we reckon comes in at around £70bn (see this blog).

And don't forget Northern Rock's £100bn debt, now formally added to the public sector balance sheet by the ONS, even though they haven't yet crunched the precise numbers (see this blog).

Add in Network Rail's debt at around £21bn, all fully guaranteed by taxpayers but excluded from the government's balance sheet.

The grand total is £1,847.5bn.

Or 130% of GDP.

Or £74 grand of public sector debt hanging round the neck of every single household in Britain.

As Timmy so correctly points out, rather than saving in the good time's, the stupid fucking Scots cunt has pissed the money up the wall, spunking away any savings in the good times and leaving absolutely less than bugger all for the lean times. About £1,847.5 billion less than bugger all, in fact.

After 15 years of a growing economy, the budget really ought to be in surplus, so as to provide room for an expansion of the deficit when the inevitable return of the business cycle happens.

He’s spent it all though and looking at the difficulty he’s having in restraining public sector wage rises, he ain’t going to be able to get out of this easily.

And that's the point, of course. The economy's slowing down, yet inflation is, in reality, pretty high. So the unions are getting uppity and agitating for higher wage rises for their members. But there's no money.

And Wat Tyler is examining what those desired pay hikes might mean for us.

As taxpayers we can only sit and grind our teeth. Once again, a Labour government has blown a shedload of money on hiking public sector pay. And once again, it's ended with most of the public sector deeply demotivated and ready to strike.

With a weak government which still has over two years to run, it's clearly going to get worse. Strikes, certainly. Cave-ins, highly likely.

One cave-in we should particularly look out for is the RPI-linked deal. Already this morning we've heard the GMB calling for RPI plus o.5%, which at present would mean nearly 5%. On a public sector paybill in excess of £150bn pa.

BOM's more mature readers will recall RPI-plus was precisely the formula that hopeless Heath visited on Britain in 1973- just before the first OPEC oil price hike. And it really did turn a drama into a wage-price spiralling crisis.

Tyler well remembers starting work as a civil servant in 1973 and seeing his pay increase by leaps and bounds every single month as the RPI soared and the Heath formula kicked in.

As Tyler points out, DCI Sam Tyler is not the only one who is going back to the 70s: we are all making the trip back to the Winter of Discontent. May I suggest that you get any dead relatives buried as swiftly as possible? Because there are going to be plenty more strikes...

Here's fun. The chart shows the number of working days lost to industrial disputes in two sectors of the economy. Let's call them Sector A and Sector B.

Now, if I tell you one is the private sector and the other is the public, can you guess which is which? Think very carefully, and remember that the private sector employs four times as many people as the public sector. And remember too that the private sector is run by Evil Capitalists who, unless they are robustly confronted by worker solidarity, will spend all day grinding the faces of the poor.

Yup, you guessed it—the sector with all the strikes is the public sector, which is currently losing nigh on one million days every year to industrial action, compared to a mere 34,000 in the whole of the private sector. Taking account of the difference in numbers employed, the average public sector worker goes on strike well over 100 times more frequently than his private sector counterpart.
...

It's time for the final act of every Labour government of Tyler's lifetime—incomes policy and many, many more strikes.

At least Tyler has already laid in stocks of flared trousers. It's only a matter of days before some government minister comes on TV telling the rest of you there are plenty to go round and you shouldn't panic buy.

Quite. Thank you so much, NuLabour; thank a fucking bunch, Gordon, you monocular wanker.

Now, I know that I rail about the Tories being a bunch of soft-Left wankers who are about as trustworthy as a... well, as a bunch of bastard politicos but, seriously, I am not sure that even they can be quite as disastrous as NuLabour.

All we need now is for Bodger and Badger to wander back from some foreign trip and say, "crisis? What crisis?" and we'll know that we're really fucked.