The News In Shorts

How the news would look if everyone stopped waffling and told the truth.

Sunday 18 May 2014

Mark Carney Calls Time On Osborne's "Recovery".

Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England, has issued a warning to George Osborne over his so-called recovery. The booming house market poses the "biggest risk" to Britain's economy, he told Sky News, while the fundamental problem remains that not enough houses are being built. This undermines the central, indeed the only, plank in Osborne's fake economic recovery. Essentially there is no recovery with GDP stagnant apart from the increase in the notional value of housing which feeds into the figures. The wealthy might be smug as they borrow against the "value" of their houses and create a slight boom in luxury goods, but the vast majority have found that their income, based upon real work and not a largely fictional increase in the value of their assets, has shrunk. This, in turn, is denting demand in the real economy and putting the brakes on production, threatening the long-term interests of the nation and undermining any prospect for a real recovery. The Tories claim that unemployment is falling as their "recovery" takes hold but the truth is that they have massaged the figures, failing to count those they have forced off benefits or forced to take up low-paid, zero-hour contract work. They remain unconcerned about such things, concentrating instead on the privatisation of national assets so they can line the pockets of their rich mates and take the backhanders that they call "donations" but are, in reality, bribes. All this corruption is taking place against the background of a sustained and deliberate assault on the poor, sick and unemployed unprecedented in British history and yet the Tories retain the support of nearly one third of the electorate. Why? As John Stuart Mill, the great 19th century liberal philosopher, once observed; "Although it is not true that all conservatives are stupid people, it is true that most stupid people are conservative."

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