Recovery? What Recovery?

George Osborne would like us all to believe that we are out of recession and that he has the figures that prove it. Yet, despite his apparent confidence, the recovery is not obvious to most of us and that includes the head of the CBI, John Cridland pictured above. He thinks that British business is in such a parlous state that workers should accept lower wages and tax payers should even pay their employee's energy bills. Yet he also claims, to try and persuade us all to vote Tory again apparently, that there is a recovery underway and business confidence is growing. How does this square with the rest of us feeling no benefit whatsoever while business, known to be cash rich, is avoiding investment like the plague because of uncertainty? The News in Shorts has talked about the new "heads we win, tails you lose" capitalism before but John Cridland seems to want to take it to an unprecedented level. He believes that we all have no choice but to accept higher prices and lower wages while he gets a tax cut and the taxpayer pays his bills. Who does he think he is, a Tory MP? Meanwhile Ed Miliband feels he has no alternative but to try and bribe business with yet another tax cut to persuade them to pay living wages. Why do businessmen, who should know that higher wages leads to greater demand, have to be bribed to do the right thing? We know that business executives are pathologically greedy but do they also have to be so unutterably stupid? Is greed and stupidity the only qualifications needed to become a business leader? Apparently so if John Cridland is a typical example. Yet the answer is quite simple. If business leaders are so utterly useless and find that they lack the ability to do the job they are so grossly overpaid for then their businesses should be taken into public ownership and they should be given jobs more commensurate with their limited abilities - stacking shelves at Tesco for instance.

Ian Duncan Smith's Voodoo Economics.

Ian Duncan Smith explained on the Andrew Marr show today how taking benefits off working people will actually make them better off. Apparently what will happen, IDS explained, is that cutting benefits will allow tax cuts for companies who in turn will pass on these savings to their workforce by way of wage increases. Those companies that don't will be "named and shamed". As Blackadder would say it's "a cunning plan" spoiled only by two obvious facts - companies always and without exception seek to reduce overheads by the simplest method avialable, cutting wages, and all companies share one characteristic, they have no shame. So, the most likely outcome of IDS's policy is that companies will get a tax cut, their executives will pocket the money and workers will continue to suffer from falling wages. It is, essentially, the same old "trickle down" rubbish that has undermined the British economy for decades. Of course IDS knows this perfectly well, but, being a complete stranger to work himself and with his own business interests to protect, he simply doesn't give a damn. After 30 years of neoliberal "voodoo economics" the Tories have remembered everything and learned nothing.