Jobless Bloke: "I Love Lisa"

While I was messing around with the word 'hypnosis' on YouTube, I stumbled on this gem.


I certainly like to listen to the sound of her woyce and I really dig the deep, hype-notic sleep that her beautiful, green-eyed woyce generates with a little of what amounts to your basic counting, as far as I can tell.

Good/bad, this puppy would definitely sleep with Lisa. (That is what she said, right?)

Whatever. But you know what? I reckon this is a Tory party political aimed at indolent male dole spongers. Brilliant! This will be one of the most effective deficit reduction strategies of all time. A government-subsidised young Russian(?) dominatrix's sex promise in exchange for significant efforts finally to find a job and stick with it.

It's definitely novel and it could be a winner. So well done, George Osborne! (As long as that's not your sister. That would be weird.)

Byrne Wriggling

Liam Byrne, no stranger to the odd pork pie, told a whole tray-full of them a few minutes ago during his interview on Radio 4. In response to the serious damage caused to Darling's tax-on-jobs NICS policy by 23 business leaders, who between them employ over 500,000 people, and who've come out in favour of the Tory proposal to more or less scrap the plans, Byrne wriggled, exaggerated, diverted and lied like only he can. The ever-changing Labour economic narrative has just morphed again, this time into an even bigger cutting machine.

For instance, while Darling was only a few days ago talking about £12Bn of 'efficiency savings' - of cutting Labour's massive overspending in other words - today Byrne talked about £35Bn in cuts. Where the hell did that come from? I'm sure he has an answer (he always does), but that's a monster leap in the cuts bidding war in just a couple of days, and gives some indication as to how hurt Labour's economic policies have been by the letter (the bigger the lie, the bigger the damage - it's always been proportional with Labour). Anyway, that's the first bit of wild exaggeration.

Then he goes on about the Tories 'magicking' up figures out of thin air (yes, Liam Byrne said that, ho ho). They will need to find an extra £9Bn in cuts, on top of Byrne's new £35Bn mega-number (he was on a roll by now). The reality is, of course, a little more modest. The Tories will need to find £11Bn in savings, of which £4.9Bn will be counted as a loss against the extra NI money that would come from Labour's tax hike and rest pumped back into the services they have ring-fenced. Byrne damned out of his own, lying mouth again, then.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of this Byrne wriggling, what it shows is that the Conservatives have won the argument on cuts; Byrne's wild numbers at least show that the debate is heading in the right direction, that the government must stop overspending so that it can cut the monstrous national debt. The other thing he singularly failed to do was attack the letter from the business leaders itself. Never once did he say that the businessmen were wrong about the tax on jobs, or, directly at least, that the Tory policy was wrong, either. He did make some feeble reference to the last NI rise, hilariously saying that jobs actually rose after it (it was well before Brown's bust, when public sector employment was still ballooning, and paid for by, you guessed it, tax rises lol), but the thrust of his trainwreck argument was that the Tories were right, but they're Tories, so they're still wrong.

Very lame, Liam. Even for you.

Massive win for the Tories.

Budget Bluster

What a load of laughable lightweight rhetoric. "I believe that government can make a difference," whimpers Darling. Yes, mate. But not this one. Not your bust government.

The whole tone of the thing makes me think that he's decided to vote Tory himself, actually (on the sly), because then, in his confused mind, at least he could guarantee the "big changes" he thinks we so desperately need - without Gordon there to wreck them, that is. Well, at least that's two things we can agree on then: the need for big changes and the necessity to vote Conservative to get them.

Peter Hoskin was a little less (a very little less) scathing about this pre-budget manure. He also thinks it's a signal that Darling's nicked another Tory policy and is going to cut business tax. I doubt it will be handled competently even if he does, however, given this nightmare government's record when it comes to the private, productive heart of the British economy. What's more, you can guarantee that it will be paid for not with vital cuts in government debt and overspending, but with tax hikes everywhere. Prepare to become a lot poorer after tomorrow, everyone.

Epic, unravelling fail, 24 hours before it's even happened.

Brown's Death Rattle

No matter what the increasingly irritating (is that possible?) Nick Robinson might think, quoting himself as usual - always a very bad sign - this was yet another trainwreck interview from Gordon "give me a chance to finish the job of destroying the country" Brown this morning. (Just remember, for instance, that when he growls that ridiculous phrase "continue the stimulus" he really means "continue adding to and Britain's, titanic, horrifying debt mountain".)



You cannot believe word one of a man who thinks that by saying he's 'cutting the deficit', he'll fool people into thinking he's actually tackling the terrifying debt explosion that he, personally, created. They are not the same thing, and this appalling man, who caused the recession in Britain to be far worse thanks to years of hopeless economic mismanagement, is doing what he always has done: telling the country - and the world - a pack of absolute lies. If he does somehow hoodwink - or even bribe - the people of this country into letting him sneak back into power, the rest of the world will deliver its verdict in short order. The economic crisis that would follow would make Brown's first, record-breaking recession look like the good old days.

But I'm pretty confident that, thankfully, the British electorate won't be fooled again. Far from the twit-Robinson's idea that this was somehow an 'assured' performance by a man pretending to be some kind of latter day Churchill, this is Brown's political death rattle. It was the last, desperate diatribe of a very desperate man clinging on to office for dear political life. I'll give him this, he doesn't sell it cheaply. The unelected fraud, who, so it goes, 'thrives' in a crisis - and therefore causes one wherever he goes and with whatever he touches - will soon be gone, gone, gone, thank God.

Hard though it might be to take for some, it is time for the Tories to come back, once again to clear up a Labour government's economic catastrophe. It's time for the medicine.

And it's way beyond the time for us to be able to say 'good riddance' to the remorselessly dishonest, politically and nationally corrosive influence that has been and will always be James Gordon Brown, the worst prime minister ever to have been inflicted upon this nation.

Billy Bragg Mashed

I thought the Daily Mash's reporting of Billy Bragg's principled hypocritical tax protest and celebtivist posturing was rather bloody funny.

DEFICIT REDUCTION WAS BASED ON SALES OF 'BETWEEN THE WARS', ADMITS DARLING

19-01-10

CHANCELLOR Alistair Darling has been forced to scrap his deficit reduction plan, admitting it was based entirely on sales of Billy Bragg's Between the Wars EP. Bragg says some RBS executives can now afford to buy a house as big as his Britain's 14th biggest pop-folk shouter is withholding his income tax in protest at Royal Bank of Scotland's continued insistence on being a bank. Bragg said: "The RBS bonuses echo the kind of backstage rider demands I never get to make at the Tolpuddle Martyrs Festival. I just hope I can make a difference before the Murdoch press hires someone to assassinate me." But the Treasury warned it will be forced to make even deeper cuts in public services, including those council-sponsored equality and diversity festivals where Bragg turns up and makes BMW-owning management consultants feel like students again for 20 minutes. Tom Logan, chief economist at Madeley-Finnegan, said: "This is potentially very serious. Five year gilts are currently being sold on the basis of guaranteed revenue streams from William Bloke and the ones he did with Wilco. "We don't want to have to use up the tax revenues from the Kirsty MacColl version of New England. We need that in case we go to war with China." Other left-wing musicians have supported Bragg's stance, with Paul Weller only declaring income from his last three solo albums and all that Style Council rubbish. Weller added: "But not Stanley Road or All Mod Cons. I'm not some fucking mug." A spokesman for the Inland Revenue said: "I've actually got a copy ofTalking With the Taxman About Poetry. Maybe he should do a new album called Talking With the Taxman About Spending 18 Months in Jail for Being a Marxist Twat." Meanwhile Bragg demanded that all banks should be run like the Co-operative with its green investment policy, fair trade mortgage refusals and the ethical way it charges you thirty quid whenever you go 1p over your limit.

You can read Billy Bragg's pile of disingenuous horse manure here, if you really want to. Some of the comments underneath it might make it worthwhile, I suppose. Like this one from 'unionjackjackson':

I similarly am withholding my tax from HRMC until we have a tory government and my money will be spent wisely.

unlike these labour tossers pissing it away.

Or this excellent one from the multi-posting Lefty-basher 'stevehill':

I'll visit you in prison Billy. Maybe.

Starving schools, hospitals, pensioners, benefit claimants etc of funds to make a protest is a particularly infantile form of toy throwing.Most bank staff are on or below the national average wage, their bonuses will be in the order of £1,000 or so, and they depend on this to pay their bills. The bank's assets - which you and I own - are essentially its people. They walk out of the door every night. You seem to accept that you can't veto HSBC or Barclays or Goldman Sachs bonuses. So how do you plan to stop the best people at RBS joining their rivals, causing the bankruptcy of RBS, the loss of 141,000 jobs, and a total write-off of the taxpayers' investment?

No, you're not an anarchist. But you're not being very smart.

Perhaps there is hope for Britain after all - so long as we all club together now to ensure that Bragg and his ilk never have any influence on the running and the future of our country again!

Then we can deal with the bankers properly. They'll keep.

King Backs Osborne

This is the implication of Mervyn King's long-overdue criticism of Crash Gordon's mishandling of the economy and creation of the largest peacetime deficit in British history, ostensibly somehow to buy his way out of recession, but in reality to try to generate some sort of fake recovery in the run-up to the general election, thereby, somehow, securing a victory. God help us all if that works.

Well, that's precisely the point, isn't it? Whatever the motive for Brown's profligacy, it's becoming abundantly clear that it won't work. Britain is not recovering, in spite of the gazillions of pounds, much of it printed, being poured down the drain to make up for Brown's truly horrific, banana republic-style borrowing and spending splurge. King, it seems, has finally come clean on the scale of the government-led secret, further bailout of those two giant Scottish banks, RBS and HBOS, (£61Bn) whose chiefs were so very close to Brown and other Scottish Labourists, and who brought such pain to the people of Britain as a whole with their casino business practices and high risk, rank profiteering. He seems to have had enough of carrying the can for all Brown's gargantuan errors of judgment, both as Chancellor and as unelected Prime Minister.

Today's Telegraph report therefore makes refreshing reading, at least for me, loathe Brown and support the Tory plan for saving the British economy as I do.

In comments which are likely to infuriate Mr Brown, Mervyn King said that the next Government would need to “eliminate a large part of the structural deficit” over one parliamentary term alone. This proposal goes significantly further than anything penned in by the Government in the Budget, or what is demanded by the Fiscal Responsibility Bill unveiled last week in the Queen’s Speech.

In a hearing of the Treasury Select Committee, Mr King said repeatedly that the Government’s plan needed to be “credible” and detailed, or it would lose the confidence of the international investors who buy British debt. He said: “I think [the plan] has to be something where a really significant reduction in the deficit, the elimination of a large part of the structural deficit, takes place over the lifetime of a parliament, which is the period for which a government is elected. Beyond that is a statement of intent and hope rather than a plan for which someone can be held accountable.”

This, to me, represents not only a "rebuke" of Brown for his incompetence and subsequent complacency about the state of the national finances, but also a clear message of support for George Osborne. And it goes further, according to the report.

In comments which will further rattle markets, Mr King said that the top-tier rating on Britain’s debt could be at risk if the Government does not go ahead with significant cuts.

He said: “I don’t think there’s any immediate risk [of a downgrade] but of course the longer there isn’t a credible plan that sets out what actions will be taken, the more that is a risk. I myself don’t think that there is any impediment to the UK putting in place a credible plan that will convince financial markets.”

This is arguably the sternest of the numerous warnings the Bank’s Governor has issued to Mr Brown over the size of the deficit. It is the first since Mr Brown announced last week that the Government would draw up legislation forcing it to cut the deficit each year for the next decade and insisting that it halves the budget deficit within four years. Since then, however, official statistics have shown that the Government is still borrowing cash at the rate of almost £3 billion a week.

I wonder how Brown will get his revenge. Remember, you see, for 'moral compass' man, it's all about politics and always has been. He will burn anyone down who shows dissent and over whom he exercises some form of control. That's Brown's way, the way of the bully, the coward and the demagogue.

It's also the Labour way. An expert has just spoken out of turn, in this case Mervyn King. We know how Labour deals with people like that, don't we Professor Nutt?

But hey, things can only get better. We can vote the bastards out in 2010. As one poll shows, published at the same time as that Guardian Ipsos-Mori rogue, (another puts Labour back down on 22%, on point ahead of the Liberals), it's looking increasingly like that's precisely what we will do. And there's nothing Brown, Mandelson or the rest of that shower of lying, ruinous losers can do about it.

Star Trek Economics

I heard some quietly chilling news on the radio while driving into work this morning and have just got in to find that Guido has already written an excellent post on the subject of deflation or, to be more precise, inflation. Yup, as predicted on the more sensible financial blogs for months now, the latter's on the rise again. Be warned, however, this is just the beginning.

As Scottie would say on the Starship Enterprise to a captain screaming for Warp 12, "I canna' break the laws of physics, Cap'ain!" In this case, the chief engineer of the Starship Britain is Mervyn King (Alistair Darling is just the helmsman); its utterly reckless captain, who managed to navigate the ship straight into an economic black hole, is Brown (naturally); and the laws of physics are, unsurprisingly, the laws of economics which, by the same token, "canna' be broken."

You print money, you devalue it. You print bucketloads of it and, well, you are courting calamity. You go into massive debt, with a huge structural deficit bolted on, and you compound that potential devaluation and turn a calamity into a catastrophe. Simple as. They will tell you that it's the oil prices, that the money is still sound. They aren't just being dishonest, I'm beginning to wonder if they (these economics 'experts') actually know what the hell they are talking about. The temptation is to trust them - they're the boffins, after all - but the economic forces at work here are so powerful that, you know what, they might not have a clue. Either way, it will be very hard for the next (I hope sensible) captain to pull us out of the gravity vortex Brown has steered us into without stripping the vessel of all its masses of dead weight first, and then by reigniting the engines with the fresh plasma that is tax cuts and other incentives for wealth creation.

Fortunately, David Cameron wrote an excellent piece for the Times this morning which outlined those very things. If only he'd reconsider the 50% tax, too. It wouldn't signal a warp speed recovery, but it might send a vital message to wealth creators and investors that they won't be punished just for being successful and simply for doing what they do best: making money and then spending it.

Here's Guido's thoughts just in case you can't be bothered to click through:

Guido was more than sceptical when politicians and Labour luvvie economists like Gavyn Davis started talking up the bogeyman of deflation at the same time as the government was running up massive fiscal deficits. It seemed too handy a coincidence that they would print money on a scale never seen before at the same time as issuing debt on a scale never seen before. They subsequently, coincidentally, bought the debt using the money they had just printed.

This we were told was to stave off deflation which it was emphasised was very bad. Goods becoming less expensive was somehow worse than goods becoming more expensive. If we got deflation it would be the end of the good times for ever according to even monetarist economists. Guido was sceptical that deflation was necessarily bad, history shows that there have been times of increasing prosperity that coincided with deflation. Deflation happened several times in the nineteenth century. During that era of rapid economic development there were no central banks and money was calculated as a certain quantity of gold or silver.

Deflation was not necessarily a threat to our prosperity, in a situation where the money supply is stable it is the manifestation of prosperity and pensioners know that their standard of living would have improved. With inflation now upticking this experiment in Mugabenomics* has to be reversed without setting off hyper-inflation or collapsing the government debt market. The policy authorities have figured out how to prop up the gilt market – they are changing the regulations to force banks to buy government debt to the tune of hundreds of billions. It remains to be seen if they can avoid an inflationary catastrophe, surging record gold prices suggest the markets suspect not…

*©Vince Cable, who was against QE before he was in favour of it. God knows what he thinks now.

I have an idea: let's make Guido chancellor. At least he seems to know what he's talking about.