SPARE ANY LOOSE CHANGE GOVERNOR?

I can't be the only person fed up to the back teeth of the ConDem coalitions lame excuses for the massive cuts they intend to inflict on our public services next week, but surely to god some amongst the Liberal Democrat faithful have some respect left to at least challenge the garbage put around by their front bench as they cosy up ever closer to their new Tory chums. All of a Sudden it is Brown not the Banks which caused the current crisis! They also never tire of telling us that:

"The deficit was far worse than we were led to believe it was before the election"

Not true. First of all the three main parties as always before a general election had full access to the red book and nothing was hidden from them, so how Vince Cable can live with his lazy lie of the UK debt being now so far worse than it was before the election is beyond me And then to use his dodgy mathematics as an excuse to dump his parties pledge to scrap tuition fees and now support a market led solution to double or treble the tuition fee and then put interest on Student loans is morally bankrupt! Both parties also conveniently fail to mention that in the month after the election the deficit forecast was reduced by £10bn making the Tories immediate cuts of £7bn unnecessary.

"We have never in our history owed as much as a nation they cry"

Again not true, the two charts below, which the Tories and Liberals don't want the public to see prove once again how desperate they are to shift attention from the real reason they are cutting our public services. Of course in real cash terms we have never owed more and also never earned more but the only true comparison you can make is as a % of GDP. Now admittedly the figures below only take us back to1700! when national debt was first recorded! So I can't speak any debt left by the dinosaurs or by the Bank of Rome, but they still make very interesting viewing

The National Debt began the 20th century at about 30 percent of GDP. It jerked above 150 percent in World War I and stayed high. Debt breached 200 percent during World War II. Debt declined to 50 percent of GDP by the 1970s and dipped to 25 percent by 1990. The National Debt began a rapid increase in the aftermath of the worldwide bank led financial crisis of 2008.

The National Debt began when William III engaged a syndicate of City merchants to market an issue of government debt. The syndicate became the Bank of England, and HM government debt began a century-long climb, financing Marlborough’s wars, wars against the French, against the North American colonial rebels, and peaking in 1815 at the end of the Napoleonic Wars at over 200 percent of GDP. Government debt exploded in World War I and World War II and then equalled the level of 1815 reaching over 200 percent of GDP. Debt declined below 50 percent of GDP by the 1970s.

So lets all now be honest before next weeks announcements as to the reasons for any cuts to public services They are of a purely political not a fiscal nature. History shows that to invest in Public Services to grow the economy is as good a plan as any in reducing the debt. Its jobs, growth and public confidence that they can spend (within their limited means) we need not a massive increase in the unemployment and benefit uptake and the rising welfare bill to pay for it. Clem Attlee after the second World War faced a national debt almost five times higher as a % of GDP to that which we face today and yet he managed to build a National Health Service, Founded the Welfare State, Built more Council Homes than any government ever has past or present, and nationalised the Railways, The Mines, together with our Gas, Electric, and Water Supplies. He set post war Britain back to work and was rewarded with growth and employment of such a scale that even the Old Tory Bore Harold Macmillan had to declare "We have never had it so good"

Britain does have a problem with debt though, but it is private not public debt that threatens to ruin us. The post Thatcher years of must have house ownership coupled with rising housing prices and the encouragement of credit to pay for things we never knew we really needed has left our personal finances in tatters.

If the current government can't sleep at night for worrying over the £772 billion total UK Public Debt then we should all be having nightmares about the £1.4 trillion record level of UK Private debt! as this chart below shows:

So when will the Liberals and the Tories own up to us that they have been economical with the truth over not only who is to blame for the current state of the countries finances and stop trying to pull the wool over our eyes as to why they plan to decimate our public services and play poker with our future risking a double dip recession all in the name of political ideology.

(with grateful thanks to www.averypublicsociologist.blogspot.com and www.boffyblog.blogspot.com and www.ukpublicspending.co.uk)