The result, O Electorate, is that our national debt is worse than Spain’s and our annual deficit is worse than Italy’s
This Autumn Statement after two and a half years of Coalition government is really an Autumn Confessional. I, Osborne the Confessor, admit that things are bad, in fact far worse than I and my Liberal Treasury chief secretary, Danny Alexander, whose last job was running a recreation park in Scotland, realised.
The horrendous mess left behind by the Old Labour tax and spend and spend and spend with added aggregation was far worse than we realised. And it doesn’t help to have Eds Minibrand and Balls-up telling us we are not spending enough when they were the hooligans in the utterly discredited Gordon Bennett, I mean Brown, so-called government, that created this mess.
The result, O Electorate, is that our national debt is worse than Spain’s and our annual deficit is worse than Italy’s. The former is now 95.7 per cent of GDP and will peak at £1.5 trillion, if we’re lucky; and the latter will be 5.6 per cent compared to Italy’s 2.1 per cent.
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This is because our growth is non-existent and all those hurrahs last quarter that the economy was growing again were a case of premature emasculation, as we are now entering a triple dip recession [as forecast only at Spear’s – damn and blast them!]. In fact, the whole eurozone is now in recession, but they want to increase their budget by 10 per cent.
And my forecasts assume £3.5 billion coming in from the sale of 4G mobile licence sales, which may not happen, and a full recovery of the £45 billion lent to RBS and £23 billion to HBOS, which will never happen, but I have to keep pretending it will.
It would be helpful if Mervyn King at the BoE would keep his trap shut, instead of getting demob happy: last week he said the British banks still have £60 billion in bad debts to write off, but as he retires in April he won’t be around for Banking Crisis II when it inevitably comes, sucking in more taxpayers’ money into the bonfire of the banks, but not affecting their asbestos-coated bonuses.
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Luckily, the rating agencies are still as asleep as they were in 2008 when the world blew up in their face, so I still have an AAA credit rating, unlike America and France! God knows why, but as this is saving me £33 billion a year in interest payments, a sum equivalent to the entire defence budget, I am not about to tell them the truth.
The truth is that we are heading for the rocks within the next five years or so, but by then I won’t be in office but will be with my neighbour on the red leather, nicely wrapped in ermine for when the Winter Fuel Allowance is cut off by the nice men from the IMF.
Ah well, we’re all in this together – Britain, the EU, the US, the BRICs – so we can all have a sovereign debt crisis party at the same time, and then knock at least two zeroes off our useless paper currency and start the whole rotten process all over again.
O wonderful thing, O capitalism! You never cease to amaze me.
