DOES THE GOVERNMENT KNOW WHAT'S GOING ON?

Yesterday the inflation figures were released. It surprised me to find that with the price of electricity going up by 6%, gas by 9%, with petrol galloping out of control, food prices going through the roof, transport costs up by 10%+, clothing up by 6%... the inflation figure managed to stay under 4%.

Odd you might think, but who am I to argue? I'm, er, sure the Treasury knows what it is doing...

So as surprised as I was to see such a low inflation figure given the pressures on my wallet, I was even more surprised to hear that the figures came as a shock to the government. Not because they were so low, but because they were so high!

Apart from wondering how the shops where Mr Osborne’s servants shop keep their prices down when “ordinary people’s” shops are putting prices up at a fair wallop, I was also a bit worried that the government was so unprepared for this. No one else is.

Then today I listened with amazement to a news item saying that the government was once again shocked at the rise in the unemployment figures, and I wondered if Mr Duncan-Smith had perhaps taken a longer than normal holiday in the past month. Every day I hear about companies shutting down or paying off. So why, I wonder, would it surprise the government that all these redundancies would result in more people being out of work? Am I missing something here, or don’t the two normally go hand in hand?

I do hear that manufacturing industry is soaring and I take great comfort in that. Mrs Thatcher seemed, for some reason, to despise manufacturing. Perhaps it was because that was where lay the industrial trades unions, comprising working class people who wanted their share of the pie, and whom she had pledged to obliterate.

If one didn’t have manufacturing, it followed that one wouldn’t have manufacturing trades unions. So she shut it all down so she could claim to have achieved her goal. 'Twas a bit tough on the rest of society, but Mrs Thatcher could be guaranteed to see only her own selfish ends.

Of course it could be that she, now mixing in circles of financial elite, had the upper working class – lower middle class snobbery about factory workers and dirty hands and decided that a country she “led” would have none of it. Or maybe a mixture.

We've seen some of the consequences of that "white collar" revolution over the years with mass unemployment, disintegration of society and the growing of a permanent underclass. Recently of course the lid blew off that side of the economy too. Given freedom to do what they wanted, it seems that financiers, people of Margaret's own circle, are every bit as irresponsible as the trades unionists from another time, just luckier in their outcomes.

Manufacturing's recovery, welcome though it may be, is based mainly on the fact that with interest rates at an historic all time low of 0.5%, the pound is worth very little (even against the Euro with all its problems), which makes our products cheap, if nothing else.

Unfortunately, of course, that only benefits those companies which are exporting. So those manufacturing for the domestic market are not benefiting.

Additionally, with inflation taking off, it will not be long before interest rates rise, probably quite steeply and rapidly, and this benefit will be lost...along with much else.

In the meantime, it would be nice if next time there is announcement of some figure or another, the government wasn’t 'gobsmacked' to hear it. Given the momentous proposals for change they are trying to push through, it might give us a little more confidence if we thought that they had some idea of what was going on on their watch.

Pics: (1) Don’t jump... oh well OK go on. (2) I’m just popping out for a paper. (3) The nightmare from hell. A visit to the uncaring, target driven, sneering, dirty, understaffed, unpleasant, smelly Jobcentre “plus”, although plus what exactly is a mystery to most. (4) Manufacturing: what the country needs; what it has always needed and always will and what some silly old woman got rid of.