Forget the beer and bingo, this budget has a darker side

......

......We made fun of beer and bingo, yet failed to notice that these were merely the sprouting of a Tory strategy. Badly done, perhaps, but meaningful.

Behind this budget was a message. It hurt, and it's working. We did the right thing and held our nerve. We're growing faster now, and so must hold our course, and here's the first tiny rewards for our strength.

This is nonsense. We're growing in precisely the opposite way than the government intended. Investment is down, confidence is returning through high house prices and deliberately low interest rates. What's more the pain of public sector restraint has just been deferred for a few years. There are huge holes in the public finances, and the government is simply waiting until after the election to decide how to close them. There is a dark wood on the edge of this town, and the government is pretending it isn't there.

Prosperity is returning, yes, and thank god for that, but it is because the government has abandoned its strategy, not because it has been resolute. There is huge pain to come because of its decision to cut too soon, and its subsequent fright. Unfortunately, that wood is so dark, no one, not even the opposition, wishes to acknowledge it.

Unfortunately, if the left cannot confront this argument head on, which requires a brutal clarity about what a Labour government would and would not do on the big consequential issues of tax and spending, then Osborne and David Cameron's argument that they are halfway to solving the crisis and should be allowed to finish the job will be left uncontested. The claim to be fixing the roof. In reality, they sawed off their foot, and then put up a tarpaulin..............

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/20/beer-bingo-budget-cameron-osborne-labour

Labour should be shouting that from the rooftops.

Yes, they should be shouting it from the rooftops. This clown Osborne and his boss Cameron are conning the nation and even his own OBR is saying that it's their austerity and cuts that have cuased the growth that they inherited to disappear and stagnate causing a delay in the recovery.

Here's the proof...

http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/71637000/jpg/_71637901_hi017437388.jpg

OBR Chairman Robert Chote

Whatever the hype and the spin, we now have it in plain language from the most official source: government spending cuts act as a ‘drag’ on growth.

I just get a picture Irn, I'd like to read that.

Quite a few links on this.

Here's just one

http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2013/09/mark-carney-spending-cuts-have-been-drag-growth

The most politically significant moment during Mark Carney's apperance before the Treasury select committee came when the Bank of England governor stated that "fiscal adjustment" (spending cuts and tax rises) "has been a drag on growth".

Wow! Proof if it was needed.