Fitaloon at MicroShaft

This image should be displayed to all supporters of Labour to get just an idea of what you  have lumbered our country with after 13 years of profligacy.

The trouble with this picture is that

• It underestimates our debt. It is nearer one trillion, that’s an extra ten percent or 17 times the cuts announced yesterday
• It ignores the fact that the mountain will continue growing, like an active volcano, for at least the next 7-10 years as we try to get the budget deficit left by Labour under control. The mountain could be 50% larger in 5 years.
• It ignores all Gordon’s creative accounting and “off-book” deals such as PFI. How much they add is anybody’s guess, mine is about 10-15% or 100-150 billion.
• It ignores the rather large Public Pensions black hole.

So whilst you regard the image,   just remember that this is just the current peak of the Volcano. It will grow, and depending upon how things go it will either gradually wear away as we get the debt and deficit under control  or it will explode and we will really suffer for Labour and Brown’s 13 years of Profligacy.

Better a wee bit of Austerity now, than complete collapse.

Labour Debt Mountain

indie25may.png (PNG Image, 718×824 pixels).

Every time I hear any news about Alex Salmond at the moment he is whinging about something.  It’s like listening to all three of my teenagers on a bad day.

It’s Alex’s belief that despite 80% of Scotland voting against him at the last General Election he somehow now is vastly superior to a Government backed  by 36% of Scotland, not a majority but a good proportion, and more than the 33% he achieved at the Holyrood elections and allows him, for  now, to try and claim he represents the whole of Scotland.

Alex should well remember this when he tries to claim his moral superiority over Cameron and Danny Alexander when they meet him today.

Now he also might look to how the Holyrood government has managed to get by for the past 3 years, with a spirit of cooperation, from many of the parties to allow things like the budget to pass.

Alex is obviously sorely disappointed that his band of 6  MP’s at Westminster, rather than the hoped for 20, have failed to be involved in a “Rainbow” coalition  which  tried so hard to become part of but was rejected almost out-of-hand by the Labour Party, but he should cut the whinging and start to look at this positively.

Scotland has come to the recession late and is now coming out of recession later then most of the rest of the UK, this will need to be noted. The unemployment rate in Scotland has now risen higher than the national average and with the Financial Area still struggling to some extent Scotland can claim it needs some extra support but listening and watching  Salmond at the moment is like watching an Ostrich with its head in the sand.

Salmond has got to come to the realisation, that the whole of the UK is in an utter mess and that the strings have got to be tightened on the previously bottomless Treasury purse. He has the right to demand a good deal for Scotland but he cannot ignore what is going on any longer.

If Alex wants real respect fro Scotland then he has to equally have respect for the UK government to rule. Until he does this he may find that his whinging has no impact on the Liberal Conservative Coalition.

It’s time for Alex to stop whinging and get on  with life after his shocking General Election campaign and results. In many ways he is lucky that his party has not looked hard at what has happened and wondered if he is the right leader now.

BBC News – David Cameron in Scotland to meet SNP’s Alex Salmond.

As the Telegraph reports, the GDP for Q4 2009 was this morning actually revised DOWN, yes DOWN.

However because it was actually an increase of 0.3 % on the revised DOWN value of earlier quarters in  2009 it appeared to be going up.

Initially the ONS thought GDP was £315,845m, it was in fact £315,712m (of course this is still an estimate). This means  the GDP was re-estimated DOWN 133m.

Why did the headline figure say it was 0.3% up an increase from 0.1%, well it turns out that earlier quarters have been revised DOWN as well. So the GDP increased in percentage figures over Q3 2009.  It also means we were in an even deeper recession than was thought.

Confused read the article in the Telegraph that tells it much better than I can.

Of course all this leads us to reflect that this is yet again Brown trying to pull the wool over our eyes. Earlier on today I noted that Fraser Nelson in the Spectator was showing us how Gordon Brown was trying to confuse us over deficit an debt, now they are trying to show a decrease as an increase.

The last words in the Telegraph article also note why we need to consider what the next real set of figures will show.

And just to add to our worries, a brief examination of the GDP figures (which are now more than three-quarters complete, so are pretty reliable), much of the growth (such as it was) was provided by retail, by car manufacture and sales, and by government expenditutre. It doesn’t take an economic genius to realise that these are all reliant on artificial props from the government (VAT cut, car scrappage scheme, brought-forward state spending) which will soon be, or have already been, withdrawn.

No wonder Alistair Darling was reluctant to spend much time basking in the apparent glory of these figures this morning. They are, I would say, more bad news than good.

Methinks it is Time for a Change

Don’t be fooled: GDP was actually revised down – Telegraph Blogs.

This article in the Guardian is seriously worrying if it is backed up by the release of figures tomorrow.

Forget a double dip. Britain may not have emerged from recession in late 2009 after all. Government figures released this morning showed a dramatic 6% fall in business investment in the final three months of the year, which all other things being equal would shave 0.5 points off output. Given that the initial estimate of growth in quarter four 2009 was just 0.1% , that’s not good news.

The even worse news is that a catastrophic 24% drop in investment over the past year leaves the economy in an enfeebled state as it attempts to recover from the deepest and longest recession since the 1930s. This, remember, is a recovery that is supposed to based on a rebalancing of growth from consumption to investment and exports. Fat chance, on the basis of today’s report.

Keep reading at the link below.

UK may not have emerged from recession after all | Analysis: Larry Elliott | Business | guardian.co.uk.

Macavity the Cat

With the  economy just having managed to push it’s snout out of the depths of recession and register a measly 0.1% rise in GDP during Q4 2009, we wonder what has happened to the “Saviour of the World” Gordon Brown.

It appears that having had a preview of the figures yesterday he found something a bit more interesting to do and buggered off to Northern Ireland leaving the fall man Alistair Darling to face the music back in London and to explain why we were the last of the G20 countries to manage the feat.

Now I’m sure that the talks in Northern Ireland are important as well but his ability to do a Macavity whenever there is bad news to be told is now becoming legend.

Will he slink back to Westminster for PMQ’s tomorrow or will he remain bunkered?

BBC News – UK economy emerges from recession.