For The Tories The War Is Over.

For Cameron and his Tory henchmen the war is over and, as far as they're concerned, they've won it. The economy might be in the doldrums and quite likely to stay there but they have achieved their main aims - saving the finance system so that it can continue its crime spree, inflating house prices once again so their property portfolios retain their value and kicking the poor and disadvantaged so they can feel better about themselves. The cost, however, is appalling. While Iain Duncan Smith hands out £44 million in bonuses to his DWP storm troopers, London is rapidly being class cleaned as ordinary people are priced out of the capital because of his vicious bedroom tax. In Plymouth alone there are over 700 families desperately trying to find smaller places to live before his tax forces them onto the streets. Meanwhile wages in Britain are now so low that only Greece, Portugal and the Netherlands are worse off. The Tories have essentially killed off all demand in the economy except for the demand of rich people for ever more expensive ways to parade their superiority. Rolls Royce, Land Rover and Jaguar are the only expanding industries in the country while those businesses geared to the demands of ordinary people are falling into bankruptcy at an alarming rate. The Tories have reacted to this in typical style, ignoring the distress in constituencies where they have no majority and featherbedding their own voters. In Welwyn, where the sitting MP is the Tory Chairman Grant Shapps, three bedroomed houses are being reclassified as two bedroomed to avoid the tax and to make sure that Mr.Shapps retains his ability to pad his expense account and continue taking bribes. With so much political corruption so openly displayed is it any wonder that Brits who still bother to vote are becoming an endangered species and Britain is edging ever closer to a breakdown of civil society?

Back To Where We Started.

George Osborne announced yesterday that the British economy was "out of intensive care". Unfortunately he forgot to add that it is now in the morgue and what we are now experiencing is actually a zombie economy. Essentially what he was announcing is that we are all back to where we started before the banks were found out. Hoh goody - an economy that doesn't work for most of us, forces up prices, forces down wages and one that is entirely based on the unearned income that comes from an unsustainable property bubble. Little wonder then that George is celebrating. He has managed to reinstate a completely descredited economic system that everyone knows did not and cannot work, one in which only criminals can prosper and one that will pauperise our children and grandchildren. But, and this is the main thing, he has protected the value of his own property portfolio and made a world safe for those with the sharpest elbows. Greed, the thing that above all else wrecked the world economy, is back where it was before - in the driving seat - while the self-serving, the smug, the selfish and the terminally stupid are reading the map.

Osborne Finishes Off The Economy.

George Osborne has now managed to get together the full bag of economic horrors. Demand is falling like a rock, confidence is at an all-time low, unemployment is rising, wages are falling and now inflation is beginning to race ahead. Austerity is like playing a round of golf with only one club and the wrong one at that. Not only is it destroying the economy it is making it ever more difficult to reverse the trend. We are near a tipping point where no amount of effort to get the economy going again can possibly work. There will simply not be enough momentum to get it moving again and nothing left in reserve to edge it forward. George Osborne is nothing less then a one-man walking disaster area, the only thing on the economic horizon with enough energy to still keep moving and that in entirely the wrong direction. There is method behind his madness, however. The recession he's so happy to promote doesn't affect the rich - people like him in other words. As the econonomy collapses the alibi that the Tories need to dismantle the welfare state gathers credence. As things get worse ordinary people are encouraged to blame each other and point the finger at those who are "undeserving". People begin to wonder if their taxes are being properly spent and support for them wanes. Soon no one will want to pay taxes at all and the Tories will be only too happy to oblige - not because its the right thing to do but because they and their rich mates will be the biggest beneficiaries. The collapse of the economy is, then, not an unfortunate outcome of the recession but a policy goal in its own right. The Tory's cannot save the economy and have no interest in doing so if that means they will have to pay higher taxes. If they cannot increase their incomes they will do the next best thing - lower their overheads. Either way they win and the rest of us lose.

Bank Of England To Choose Between Equally Useless Measures.

The Bank of England is contemplating which utterly useless thing it will do next. The choice lies between pumping more money into the banks as "qunatative easing" where it will never see the light day again in the wider economy, or punishing savers by reducing the base rate from 0.5% to some equally irrelevant level. We asked a Bank spokesperson for a comment; "You are quite wrong in claiming that we only have a choice between two things - we also have the alternative of doing absolutely nothing at all. The fact that all three choices amount to the same thing is neither here nor there. Since we haven't got a clue what we're doing anyway we are seriously thinking about choosing by chanting "eeny, meeny, miney, mo" or, more excitingly, by playing a knockout game of "paper, scissors, rock." We are confident that, whatever choice we make or don't make, we will retain our jobs which is the main thing. In the meantime austerity remains the only viable alternative and our future projections suggest that we will have saved the British economy when we're reduced the entire population to bartering for basic foodstuffs." Our reporter next turned to George Osbourne for his view; "Personally I think they should stick to the tried and tested method of putting all three alternatives in a bag and then choosing one at random. That's what I did when I wrote the budget. Except for tax cuts for the rich, that was my idea. In fact it was and remains my only idea."

Tories Continue To Kill The Patient.

In her speech about the British economy Christine Lagarde effectively told us that George Osborne was doing all the right things while it was only reality that prevented his policies from working. In other words the cure is working but the patient is dying nevertheless. We all laugh when we read about Medieval doctors bleeding their patients to remove "evil humours" but it isn't funny when George Osborne does the same thing to the economy. Neoliberal economics was once described by George Bush Snr as "voodoo economics" and he wasn't wrong. It is based on a self-serving mythology, mumbo-jumbo of the worst kind, and inflicted on the rest of us by the greedy and stupid for whom economics is not a science but a kind or religion - an irrational belief that if you do enough idiotic and utterly selfish things everything will turn out for the best. Well it hasn't, as everyone can now plainly see. Demand in Britain fell sharply in April with people, fearful of the future and having no faith whatsover in this woeful government, unwilling to spend. To add to the fear factor Adrian Beecroft has now unveiled his plans to make it easier to sack the very workers he depends upon to keep his businesses afloat. Nothing illustrates better the sheer idiotic vindictiveness of these people who seek to restore confidence by making everyone more fearful and promote growth by making everyone (except themselves) poorer. The madness of super-sized austerity is evident in the situation in Greece and will soon be evident in Spain and still people like Angela Merkal insist that administering poison is the only cure. The insane have been in charge of the asylum for too long.