Cameron Is Handed An Unexpected Bill.

You know the feeling. Christmas is coming up, its costing you a fortune to get to work every day, the council tax is due, your gas and electric bills are spiraling as the colder weather begins and then the boiler breaks down or the engine of your car explodes. All the savings you've managed to scrape together during the previous year are now about to evaporate and next years holiday in Spain is becoming less and less likely. How would you feel then if you'd recently changed your job and were now earning more money only to find that the government was demanding that you hand over your extra pay to them? That is how poor David Cameron must be feeling this morning as the EU demands an extra £1.7 billion before the beginning of December because of the "strength" of the British economic "recovery". It must be even more galling since the so-called "recovery" is nothing of the kind and is largely based on the notional increase of house prices in London. The Tories are about to be hoist on their own petard though, as always, it will be the taxpayer (that's you and me, not the Tory's corporate chums who don't pay tax) who will pick up the bill. Cameron and Osborne have been enjoying themselves immensely for months boasting to Europe about their non-existent recovery and trying their best to kid the rest of us into voting for them in the forthcoming May general election. The EU has called their bluff and how can Cameron and Osborne now plead poverty? Oh dear what a dilemma. Still its not all bad news. At least the rest of us can sit back and watch the spectacle of Tory back-benchers falling over each other in their haste to join UKIP.

Tory Threat Level Raised To "Severe".

The threat from the Tories in Britain has been raised to "severe" as it becomes increasingly likely that they will lose the next election and will attempt to fill their offshore bank balances at our expense. The National Debt is now larger than at any time in our history while George Osborne has now borrowed more than every Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer combined. Analysts have speculated that this may be the result of lower tax returns than expected which has come as a complete surprise despite the record level of tax cuts and evasion loopholes provided for wealthy corporations and individuals. "We just can't understand it," a Treasury spokesman told our reporter. "Despite lowering the tax bill for millionaires we have failed to collect more money as predicted by our economic models. Since it is a well known fact that taxing rich people actually produces less revenue then lowering their tax liability should have returned more revenue. It stands to reason doesn't it? We can only speculate that poor people must have been hiding their income from benefits in offshore bank accounts while the working poor must have found a way to avoid PAYE. No other explanation fits the facts. Fortunately none of this threatens the economic recovery since that is based almost entirely on the London property market and, even if it does, we still have most of the NHS available to flog off to our rich pals in an emergency." Warnings have now been issued by security experts that the threat to the British way of life from militant Tories is now at an all-time high. "These people are desperate and utterly ruthless terrorists," one adviser told our reporter. "They subscribe to an evil ideology and think nothing of stealing food from starving children or stealing money from helpless pensioners. The only thing that remains safe is property prices in London and that is about the only thing that stands between ordinary people in Britain and what the Tories like to call "market forces" - an evil perversion of economic theory first promulgated by the Ayotollah Margaret Thatcher."

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."

Britain: Not Booming But Drowning.

Despite weeks of Tory propaganda about how the recovery is underway and austerity is working the truth is that the only recovery discernible is in the London property market. Manufacturing output continues to shrink, house building is juddering to a halt, prices are still rising and income, unless you happen to be a millionaire, is still being squeezed. As the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) has made absolutely clear today, income for ordinary people continues to be 6% less than it was in 2008. They also recognise that austerity will squeeze ordinary incomes even more in the next few years as benefits and tax credits are slashed. Even if the British economy was to expand at an unprecedented 5% per year we will not get back to 2008 levels until 2020. Meanwhile the criminals who crashed the banking system are still paying themselves eye-watering "bonuses" while their businesses continue to lose billions and energy executives are holding us to ransom having increased their prices by 60% in the last five years. As far as the super-wealthy are concerned there is no recovery since, for them at least, there was no recession in the first place. The Tories are not running a government, nor are they running an economy, they are conducting a war against the people that has only one goal in sight - lower taxes for themselves and their wealthy backers. As the Tory-voting electorate in Somerset are now finding out to their cost, greed and selfishness are a poor substitute for a civilised society.

Carney Pricks Cameron's Bubble.

Things were looking good for Cameron and the bunch of conmen he calls a government this week. Their campaign to deny benefits to those out of work was magically translated into "falling unemployment figures", ignoring the cuts in benefits to those in work was magically translated into "rising living standards" and the re-inflated property bubble was translated into an "economic recovery." Meanwhile Iain Duncan Smith was trying to kid us that his vicious attack on the most vulnerable in our society was the modern equivalent of William Wilberforce's campaign against slavery while wittering on about the Tory party's "historic mission." The IMF obliged the Tories by claiming that Britain's growth this year would be the best in Europe, conveniently ignoring our ballooning national debt and the fact that most of this "growth" would be in the purely notional value of houses in London. The truth, studiously ignored by the media, was left to Mark Carney, the Governor of the Bank of England, who quietly backtracked on his promise to raise interest rates if unemployment falls below 7%. He knows perfectly well that the government has been massaging the unemployment figures and is not prepared to raise interest rates on the basis of pure fiction. Not wishing to underline this he claimed, instead, that his decision would be based on the strength of the "recovery", which, without putting too fine a point on it, was both weak and also largely fictional. The truth is that Mark Carney does not dare to raise interest rates since that would immediately deflate the property bubble and bring the non-existent nature of Osborne's "recovery" crashing to the ground. The Governor and the Chancellor are now locked into a game of denying reality and hoping against hope that somehow their fantasy views of the economy will magically come true. This is voodoo economics at its most outrageous and its most forlorn.

Recovery In Britain Still Non-Existant.

Despite the theft of Royal Mail, one of Britain's largest national assets, and George Osborne's efforts to re-inflate the property bubble, the economy remains stubbornly in intensive care. As the Office for National Statistics cannot help but point out manufacturing output is still flat with no discernible improvement over the last six months while the building industry is still in the doldrums. How can this be? In terms of the Royal Mail the reason is easy to see. A national asset that once added value to Britain's overall economy has been flogged off for far less than it was worth to a bunch of already wealthy crooks who have now stuffed their "profits" into the nearest available offshore account. Not only has much of the turnover from this huge industry been diverted into private hands and the money generated taken out of circulation, tax revenues have also fallen as the crooks who gobbled up the shares run off with their tax-free swag. With no improvement in manufacturing and exports Osborne's so-called "recovery" is revealed for what it is - a fairy tale based on a notional belief that house prices have grown, at least in London if nowhere else. The "recovery" is, therefore, restricted to those who own at least two properties, one of which can be sold while the owner lives in the other and one of which happens to be in London. What kind of person has two over-priced houses one of which happens to be in London I wonder? Of course such a person would be even better off if someone else, the taxpayer for instance, had bought both properties for them. But who would fall into this category? Surely not George Osborne, the architect of this "recovery", and his fellow conspirators in the Tory party? What a coincidence! What an unexpected windfall! What a surprise! What a bunch of crooks!

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.

The Grin Of The Tory Cheshire Cat.

Yesterday the Cameron government was grinning like a collective Cheshire cat when the economic figures suggested that Britain was coming out of recession. However, like that ficticious feline, the grin is the only substantial part of this dire collection of spivs and conmen. The truth is that Britain's economic performance, when the shrinkage of the last two-and-a-half years is taken into account, is doing no better than flatlining. When it comes to pay, the Tories have also been falling over each other to explain why the minimum wage for teenagers is to be frozen yet again. As you might expect it is the usual one of the minimum wage "preventing" companies from employing young people despite the "fact" that business is picking up and, presumably, profits are increasing. Nor does this explain the claim by Cameron at the Tory conference that more than a million people have been recruited by a resurgent private sector. This figure is actually less impressive when the 158,000 who are on Government- sponsored training and employment schemes are taken into account, not to mention the 196,000 workers transferred wholesale from the public to the private sector in the higher education sector or the 300,000 jobs created while Labour was still in power. Cameron's impressive "one million" thus becomes a far less impressive and completely insignificant 346,000 while the loss of 628,000 jobs in the public sector puts it into perspective. "One swallow does not a summer make," the old saying goes any more than a collection of dubious statistics, empty promises and flimsy alibis make a recovery.

Osborne Cancels The Recovery For Ordinary People.

The full effects of George Osborne's economic policy are becoming increasingly clear and the news is not good. As the "Guardian" points out, even if the next eight years were to be a golden age of economic recovery and expansion most people in this country would get no benefit from it whatsoever - nothing. In fact, by 2020, the bottom half of the population could expect their income to drop by at least 3% while the top half would see a steady rise in their take home pay. Osborne has effectively entrenched the economic divide and, with no recovery in sight, the reality of this is bound to be even more stark. There can no longer be any doubt as to who is going to bear the burden for the criminal behaviour of the banks or for the utter and complete failure of the neoliberal economic experiment. Osborne has picked his victims and nothing, short of revolution, will deflect him from his aim of pauperising the entire country to protect the wealth of both himself and his Tory-voting, tax-dodging, greedy and selfish pals. Like Mitt Romney in the US, he's simply not interested in half of his fellow countrymen because he regards them as peasants - even if some of them are stupid enough to vote Tory. As Andrew Mitchell so elegantly put it, we "f**king plebs" should "know our place."