DO THEY EVER TELL THE TRUTH ABOUT ANYTHING? REALLY...EVER?

"I"

"Financial Times"
(CLICK TO ENLARGE)

MORE AUSTERITY TO BE ANNOUNCED

There are yet another £16 billion in spending cuts to come (so shortly after the daft budget in which Osbum got everything wrong). The Treasury has ordered government departments to save another 5% of their budgets as the economy continues to go down the sink.

Danny Alexander will be warning us all (aren’t you glad we’ve got him and his financial genius?) of the need for even greater austerity measures today as he tells all departments to put aside more money. 

"These new controls are not just a tweak to the Whitehall machine," Mr Alexander will say according to advance reports of a speech he is set to make to the Institute for Fiscal Studies today. "They are another signal of our unwavering determination to deliver the fiscal consolidation we promised. When we look at the mess Britain's finances were allowed to get into, we say: 'never again'."

Never again? Funnily enough, that’s just what we were thinking, Danny

I wonder if this even greater austerity will be hitting the Westminster glitterati in any way.

I mean, will Lords’ allowances go down? 

Will canteens, sorry dining rooms, be subsidised less? 

Will bars start charging commercial prices for the drink that they clearly all consume in such vast quantities (how else to explain the drunken way the whole government operates)? 

Will MPs’ pensions reduce in line with the devastation of ordinary people’s pensions (and lives)? 

Will some of the expense of the Jubilee be reigned (see what I did there) in?

Will some of the frills for the Zil class at the Olympics be cut? 

Will they reverse the cut in the 50% rate of tax? 

Will they sell the crown jewels to some Chinese, Arab, Indian, Brazilian or Russian trillionaire and spend the money on infrastructure renewal?

Will they admit now that Britain is too wee, too poor and too stupid to have nuclear weapons and sit as a permanent member on the security council?

Nope? None of these? Thought not.

But, in an admission that the London executive is worried that Whitehall will be unable to keep spending down to the new levels of austerity, all departments will from now be required to report their figures to the Treasury on a monthly basis. (Not that Dan doesn't trust the useless cabinet members or anything, you understand.)

I would say that the UK is a bankrupt state as well as a bankrupt idea. Let's start splitting it up now, so that Scotland can deal with the financial pressures of the 21st century with a proper finance minister at the helm. I'd trust John Swinney any day over the buffoon at number 11. If we had been left in his hands, I suspect that, like Iceland, we'd be well over the worst of this.

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NO AUSTERITY FOR JEREMY WHAT'S HIS NAME

Always good to put on a show for the neighbours, don't you think.


Despite all the evidence of doom and gloom, the English Culture Secretary, the man some people call Jeremy Hunt, has announced that London's Olympics will not be austerity Olympics. Apart from MPs, top businessmen, the royals, lords and anyone from the city, the rest of us are living austerity lives, and will be, all the way through next year, but the Olympics will be lavish.


Yes, fut coat and no knickers Hunt promises us a show to remember. After all, it will be a time for people like him and Cameron and Prince Sebastian and all their business rich mates, to enjoy the best of everything at our expense, even down to having special lanes on roads reserved just for them.


There was a choice, according to that great expert of all things economic and sporting. We could say that because these are austere times we should pare everything back, or we could say that because there are times of austerity we must harness the Olympics. "People", he said,"would not forgive us" if we didn't make the most of the opportunity to spend spend spend. He said that it was going to be an incredible expression of British culture, British history and British creativity. 


What is the fool on about? 


It's the bloody Olympics; they belong to a city, in this case London. Most of the rest of us will see what we see on tv, just as if they had been staged in Paris, Ulan Bator, or the Moon! The only difference is we have all had to go without to pay for  our betters to prance around self importantly on the telly.


Most of the promises that came with the Olympics have already been broken. I seem to remember in the dim and distant past, that there were to cost around £3 billion; now that figure is nearly £10 billion, and rising. 

The security budget, the extent of which we will never know, has been more than doubled recently, as has the "showbiz" part of it, the opening and closing parts, where doubtless, the likes of Prince Sebastian Cameron and H h h h hunt will be sitting in a grand box along with the Queen.


There was supposed to be an increase in sporting activity throughout the four countries that are paying for it; in fact sporting activity has actually dropped off. 


There were promises about the stadia being taken over by private companies; now it appears that nothing can be agreed and extra costs are to fall on the government, ie us, for them.


The accommodation of the athletes' village cost a billion to build and was supposed to earn a profit when it was sold; however, it only raised around half of that.


The Treasury is currently analysing the economic impact of the Games, but Mr Hunt, the genius that he is, has pre-empted them to tell us that it will be significant. Well, that's all right then. Thank God they have him; whatever would they do without him?

FUNNY OLD WORLD

Well, would you ever believe it?

Of course you would. I mean on a day when it turns out that:

700,000 children have being diagnosed as having learning difficulties, when they don't, presumably so that schools can access extra money regardless of the effect on the children and hide low sandards of teaching;

The police tell us that less money for policing will result in fewer police and that this will be dangerous at a time when social unrest is on the rise (not that they are trying to protect their own salaries or anything!!!);

Having told us only a few weeks ago that house prices were on the up, sellers have been told to drop their prices by 10%;

That inflation is 150% of what was forecast...close eh? I mean why do we pay the economists at the Bank of England and the Treasury? Are all their forecasts out by this kind of margin?

And that Nick Clegg, in the midst of the financial (and soon to be social) crisis, is wittering on about improving the lot of women in the third world..... (Why do we always have to be leading the way in poking our inexpert noses into other people's affairs? Why do we not do something about the horrors at home?)..........
It should come as no particular shock that Tony Blair has been awarded the Philadelphia Liberty Medal in recognition of his “steadfast commitment to conflict resolution”.

I can’t think of much to say about that... except don’t you think that it plays into the hands of people all over the Muslim world who think that they are simply second of third class citizens of the world?

Here’s a guy who in collaboration with Bush showed a ''steadfast commitment'' to killing innocent people and causing untold, and to us unimaginable, suffering and all kinds of hell in Afghanistan (legally) and Iraq (illegally) ... and they award him the Liberty Medal.

Funny old world?

... Still, unto those who have, etc....there are and have always been some people who could fall off the tenth floor into a pile of manure, bounce up onto their feet and walk home smelling of Yves St Laurent!

I just hope Blair can see the irony.