George Osborne fails on his own terms.
“You have to look at the performance of the UK economy compared to other large western economies”
– George Osborne, interview with Sky News, 25 April 2013
Yes, George. That’s exactly what you have to do.
In the last 12 months the US economy has grown by 1.8 per cent compared to the UK’s 0.6 per cent.
Since the government’s ‘Emergency’ Spending Review in October 2010, the UK economy has grown by just 1.1 per cent – compared to the 6 per cent forecast by the Office for Budget Responsibility at the time. Between then and Q1 2013 the USA has grown by more than four times that amount – 4.9 per cent (and advance estimate of the first quarter of 2013 has GDP up 2.5%).
In February 2009, Barack Obama introduced his $800 billion stimulus program. In October 2010, George Osborne knocked the wind out of the British economy.
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10 Responses to “George Osborne fails on George Osborne’s terms”
tangentreality
Of course it has. The US has made much bigger spending cuts than us.
Kevin
Given the US popultion is 314m to 62m (UK), ratio of 5:1 your headling is very wrong/ misleading, would you not agree?
Nobody important
George believes that the public sector is bad and wasteful and the private sector is good and productive. He believes that by cutting back the state he will create space for the private sector to grow.
How this will happen when 54% of all businesses fail in their first five years is a mystery to everyone but Mr Osborne.
It may well be true that there are inefficiencies in the public sector, but the reason that the sate is so large and costs so much is because it has to fund the failings of the current model of capitalism. Take rent as an example. Rents are too high because banks lend money to landlords and those landlords want to make a profit. Many of the landlords the banks lend to are technically insolvent as soon as they take out a mortgage as they could not afford to pay the mortgages on their rental properties without the money they receive from their tenants. However, there are many tenants who self evidently can afford to service a mortgage, as they can afford to pay a landlord his rent plus profit, yet the banks will not lend to them but are quite happy to lend to the landlords who cannot afford to pay their mortgage without letting out the property. So effectively billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money in the form of housing benefit is being spent funding insolvent landlords purchasing properties which they then use to inflate rentals in order to make profit.
This is just one example of the insane inefficiencies inherent in our current capitalist model.
Such post credit crunch inefficiencies demonstrate the lack of reform of the banking system. Before the crunch they lent too much money to the wrong people, and after the credit crunch they are still lending too much money to the wrong people. The bankers have learnt nothing and neither has the chancellor.
TristanPriceWilliams
I doubt that Osborne believes for a minute that what he has done will improve the economy. What it will do is knock the public sector on the head and reduce the size of the state in a way which would never have been acceptable at any other time.
He’s fulfilling a Tory wet dream.
Eventually. of course, the world economy will. in all probability. pick up. It will be no thanks to Osborne. But Britain (hopefully only England) will go into the future with a far smaller public sector, terrible services for the poor, starvation, and misery at the bottom end, but a great life for the millionaires of Mr Osborne’s school day and Bullingdon friendships.
Sids666
Well the US growth may be up by 2.5% in the last quarter – but they actually cut Public Spending (unlike the UK) by 4.1%.
I do agree with you that we should try and emulate the US policies.