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Alistair Darling's Budget is one of the worst budgets ever

This is one of the worst budgets ever- even by Gordon Brown’s woeful standards. It will do nothing whatsoever to stimulate the economy, create employment and avoid recession. It will do very little to protect the environment as the so-called "green taxes" are simply just desperate revenue raising measures and are hypocritical coming from a Government which pursues global warming and environmentally disasterous policies such as Heathrow, Gatwick and Stanstead Expansion and coal-fired power stations.It will do nothing to get people out of the poverty trap or to stimulate the economy and help Britain thrive in an increasingly  competitive world.It will not protect Britain against recession and in fact may hasten recession and make it worse. It will not stimulate private sector employment.It does nothing to reduce real cost inflation for ordinary people which is now running at well over 7% per annum when rapidly rising food, housing, fuel and tranport prices are properly accounted for.It is backward rather than forward looking, regressive, unimaginative, much too complex, inefficient and economically illiterate. But there again Alistair Darling was a lawyer and Gordon Brown was and is still a historian and neither of them know very much about economics, poverty, business or the real economy.Alistair Darling fiddles while Brown broods and worries about his place in history.What we need now are very serious cuts in public expenditure, a massive downsizing of the bloated public sector, concentration of spending on front-line services, radical reform of Brown’s wasteful,complicated and inefficient tax and credit schemes, raising the basic  personal allowance for everyone to at least £10,000 a year (like in Ireland) to take the lower paid, pensioners and others out of the tax and benefits dependency traps, abolition of hundreds of quangoes, regional assemblies, advisory bodies and such like, strict control on the hiring of expensive private sector consultants to do the work which should be done by civil servants, reduction of corporation tax for small businesses to 15%, an end to foreign military adventures we cannot afford or sustain and a greater harmonisation of public spending throughout the Disunited Kingdom.And of course we need an end to the expensive, wasteful and immoral EU Common Agriculural and Fisheries Policies and the increasing transfers of British taxpayers' money and rights to the unelected, corrupt and unaccountable EU bureaucracy.The Conservative Party response so far has been adequate but not radical enough. It took an American journalist on Sky News this morning to remind us of the Laffer Curve, an economic concept widely accepted in the USA, Ireland and elsewhere which says that if you reduce taxes and give people the freedom to spend and invest their own money, the economy will be stimulated, more jobs will be created, exports will grow, companies will prosper and consequently tax revenues will grow allowing more money to be spent on defence, literacy, numeracy, education, health services, the police, prisons, pensions, infrastructure and the other essential functions of government.It is time to:Move Over, Darling.

David Giles ● 6345d1 Comments

The economic situation in the UK is very serious because we also have a lot of sub-prime mortgages, huge levels of personal and public debt and many banks and financial institutions who have over the years lent simply more money than they should have. The British economy depends greatly on the property market and if that tumbles we are all in big trouble.However the situation in the UK is in many ways more serious than elsewhere because since 1997 Labour has turned a relatively low-tax economy into a high tax, high Government spending economy.Other countries have reduced taxes and controlled spending better.By 2010, Government expenditure will double to £674 billion compared to Government expenditure in 1997.Labour's public spending splurge has seen government spending increase from 37 per cent of GDP to 45 per cent of GDP.The Government now employs 800,000 more people than it did in 1997 - despite that fact that the number should be much less because of information technology and outsourcing.The savings ration has plummeted from 11% to 3 %.Consumer debt is now 156 % of household income.Britain's budget deficit of 3.2% of GDP is by far the biggest of any major economy.Income tax receipts have doubled since Labour came to power in 1997.Council tax receipts have doubled since Labour came into power in 1997.Have public services improved by 100% ?Last year Chancellor Gordon Brown said he would boorrow £30 billion in 2008/2009.Last week Chancellor Alistair Darling said the Government would borrow £43 billion on 2008/2009- a staggering 43% increase !Brown estimated that Government borrowings would be £28 billion on 2009/10. Darling now estimates that they will be £38 billion.And of course these figures don't include the billions in PPP debts and the billions owed by Northern Rock.The UK has a higher proportion of its population in relative low income than most other EU countries: of the 27 EU countries, only 5 have a higher rate than the UK. The proportion of people living in relative low income in the UK is twice that of the Netherlands, and one-and-half times that of both France and Germany. In 2005/06, almost 13 million people in the UK were living in households below the low income threshold.  This is around a fifth (22%) of the population. Around 5 million people are in receipt of an out-of-work benefit.  Of these, almost 3 million are sick or disabled, a million are unemployed and three quarters of a million are lone parents. One in four 19-year-olds still fail to achieve a basic level of qualification and one in twelve have no qualifications at all. One in ten 16- to 18-year-olds is not in education, employment or trainingThe unemployment rate for 19- to 24-year-olds has been rising since 2004 and is now three times the rate for older workers. The Fudgit Budget has failed to tackle these problems.

David Giles ● 6340d