Gordon Clown .Com

Pull the other one Gordon!  Seriously.  Barber, Lawson, Brown.  Inflationary chancellors.  Apparently Gordon says that we must not let inflation get out of control:

This is the right time to send a signal that we’re determined not to return to stop-go, that we’re determined to bear down heavily on inflation.

“Determined to bear down heavily” to the extent of dropping rates down to all time low levels and creating the biggest asset bubble ever seen in the history of Britan, eh Gordon?  Yes, we know what you mean.  Eddie George even admitted it a few days ago!

The Brown Boom - it will go down in history.  Only to be outdone by the Brown Bust.

Much as Gordon hates it, the MPC’s desperate flapping attempts to keep runaway inflation under control seem likely to lead to another interest rate rise, possibly as early as next week.  Swervin’ Mervyn King has commented that the rocketing money supply of 14% per year might - just might - be a sign that inflation is out of control.  Indeed with RPI already at 4.6% it’s hard to find anyone else who might have missed this fact - aside from Gordon of course. 

Desperate to keep rates down and voters happy, Gordon will no doubt attempt once again to knobble the MPC and fiddle the CPI figures for the umpteenth time.  The Office for National Statistics recently upgraded the weighting of fuel and oil in the CPI basket, a cunning move as with Oil prices currently lower than this time last year, they would at their current price be contributing to bringing CPI down from the current sky high 2.8%.  No sooner had they done this, however, when Iran stepped in and grabbed 15 Brits, which has helped push oil back up a few dollars per barrel.  And if the situation doesn’t get sorted soon, the price may rise yet more, and Brown and the ONS could be laughing on the other side of their faces.

Here’s what Merv had to say about M4:

Mr King said policymakers should ignore the recent increase in money floating around the UK financial system at their peril, saying it indicated that inflation would soon rise.
 
His comments, to the Commons Treasury Select Committee yesterday, underlined expectations that the Monetary Policy Committee is prepared to lift borrowing costs to 5.5pc either next month or in May.

Mr King said: “I’m more concerned with monetary aggregates than some of my colleagues. To ignore it as a potential influence could lead into tricky territory.”

“My concern about the money numbers is whether they are telling us something about the inflation numbers not in two years but in maybe three to five years. To ignore it as a potential medium-term influence could lead into potentially tricky territory.”

Gordon has been desperately trying to keep under the radar this week, as his Budget of a week ago appears to have been exposed as a complete sham and nothing but a pack of spin designed to fool the electorate.  And then there was the horrendous nose-picking incident, the video of which has now had well over 70,000 viewings on YouTube.

But it seems the press just can’t keep away as it was revealed today that child poverty has begun to increase again after almost a decade of steady declines.  This will come as bad news to Gordon who has a target of reducing it by 1 million by 2010.

Opposition politicians and poverty campaigners said a core government policy was failing and warned that its 2010 target could be missed by a million children, in spite of measures announced by Gordon Brown in last week’s budget.

Official figures showed relative poverty - those living on less than 60% of average incomes - rose to 12.7 million people in 2005-06, from 12.1 million the year before.It brings to an end the longest period of falling poverty since records began in 1961. The number of children living in poor families rose by 200,000 to 3.8 million.

…

Mr Brown announced £1bn more in tax credits for poorer families in last week’s budget. Experts think that could lift 200,000 children out of poverty, but that would only be a fifth of the way to the 2010 target of one million. The IFS says the government would need to spend £4bn extra by 2010 on help for poor families to make its target achievable but Mr Murphy said the new strategy was about getting more parents into some of the 600,000 vacant jobs available. “People should never be better off on benefit.” The shadow chancellor, George Osborne, said the “depressing” figures showed “that poverty is increasing, inequality is rising, and the incomes of the poorest fifth are in decline. Gordon Brown made tackling poverty the great promise of his chancellorship, and yet he leaves the Treasury with poverty rising.” The Liberal Democrat work and pensions spokesman, David Laws, said: “These figures are dreadful for the government, with child poverty rising to almost a third of all UK children. Poverty in Britain is increasing again, and social mobility seems to have been falling. The government’s ambition to cut child poverty now looks in tatters.”

Not much good news around for Gordon at the moment, it seems.

A picture tells a thousand words, and plastered across the papers today were pictures of the Iron Chancellor filmed in Parliament sitting behind Tony, picking his nose! Impressing voters with his stealthy sneakiness (much like the tax cut cons in the Budget), but no doubt disgusting them at the same time, Gordon sat there and openly committed the foul act not once, but twice! Seeing is believing of course, so if you feel the need the video can be found here.

Massive headline on the front of today’s Daily Express: Now The Big Tax Backlash. Not great news for Gordon - he’s gone from hero to zero in a matter of days. The cheers from the Labour benches on Wednesday as he announced his 2p tax cut now a distant memory, and replaced by the jeers and groans of the media and public at large over his con attempt gone wrong. Exposed as a liar and a spinner, robbing from the poor to give to the rich, all in a desperate attempt to win a few lousy votes.

Instead of a tax giveaway, taxes will go up by the equivalent of £100 a year for every household in Britain.

As the backlash began against the Chan­cellor’s blatant deception, experts poring over the Budget small print discovered that Mr Brown is raising taxation by £2billion a year by 2010. And at least one in five families will be worse off as a result.

Mr Brown posed as a tax cutter. But as the Daily Express made clear yesterday, his 2p reduction in income tax was more than offset by other tax rises.

The deception led some to question whether the Chancellor had made the biggest blunder of his career and is losing his political grip.

Surely there can no longer be any question - whatever “grip” Gordon may have had at some point has long since deserted him. Since it has become clear that he is unable to work with others due to his numerous mental defects and attitude problems, who knows how long he can last in number 10?

It hasn’t taken long for the real truth to emerge about Gordon’s budget on Wednesday. 2p off the basic rate of income tax and he doubtless expected to be showered with praise and win votes up and down the country. The abolition of his own 10% tax rate to fund this measure was a mere detail of course. Well thanks to a bit more in depth analysis, it seems that is not the case.

The BBC, probably the most visited news website out there, has an article giving a run down of the winners and losers of the budget, and surprise surprise it seems the poorest will be the biggest losers. So much for Gordon Brown, “man of the people”. KPMG have worked it all out for us, in fact. Firstly the losers:

Taking into account the effect of changes to income tax and NI - although not tax credits - in 2008-09, compared to this coming financial year (2007-08), then most people will be better off because they will be paying less money to the Chancellor.

The most obvious exception will be people earning £17,000 a year or less.

By having a slice of their income taxed at 20%, rather than 10%, they will pay more - £131 a year more, KPMG estimates, if their income is less than £10,000.

And now for the winners:

The biggest winners in this calculation will be those earning about £35,000 a year.

They will keep £353 a year more, according to KPMG.

The rise in the ceiling for the standard 11% NI contribution rate means that those earning about £40,000 a year will gain very little - just £24 a year.

They will now pay NI on the top slice of their income which was not subject to it before.

Meanwhile those earnings more than £43,000 will gain £196 a year overall.

So, typical Gordon it seems. Taking from the poorest and giving to the richest. In fact, as long as you earn more than £17,000 per year, you are ahead. Money taken directly from the pockets of those earning less. A very typical New Labour way of redistributing wealth it would seem.

Helpfully, KPMG have arranged a handy graph for us all to see where we fit in:

See if you can find yourself there. Luckily for Gordon, he’s well above the zero point, as are his friends and colleagues. So that’s all right then.

With today’s budget, Gordon has tricked the public into believing he’s cut taxes, when in fact he hasn’t. In fact, the removal of the 10% tax band and the cut of 2% on the next band up will hurt low earners, and only benefits high earners very slightly. But as ever with Gordon, the sting is in the spin, and the BBC amongst others have fallen for it hook line and sinker with headlines such as “Gordon Cuts Tax by 2p”.

One interesting thing about this measure is that, like a lot of measures in today’s budget, it doesn’t come into effect until next year.  This means, presumably, that whoever succeeds Gordon as chancellor in the next few months won’t actually need to announce a budget for a few years.  Gordon seems to be seeking to ensure his rules are followed even after he’s left office…
Other than that it was a fairly dull budget, unsurprisingly as Gordon is desperate to maintain the status quo to ease his passage into the house next door. Hopes for changes to Stamp Duty and Inheritance Tax went unfulfilled, and fiscal drag has been allowed to drag on in almost all cases, apart of course from the areas such as beer and fags where fiscal drag would be bad news for the treasury’s coffers.

Desperate to appear to be doing his bit for the green cause, Brown raised road tax for 4×4 “gas guzzlers” to £400, completely missing the point - as do most politicians - that global warming is far too large an issue to be solved simply through a few punative taxes on a small proportion of the public, and needs stronger measures to be affected at the multinational business level. Gordon took care of big business of course with a bit of corporation tax cutting - but simply passed it on to tax hikes for small businesses. Another nail in the coffin for entrepreneurship in Britain should ensure the ongoing brain drain continues.

Eddie George, former Bank of England governor, today admitted that he and Gordon hatched a plan a few years ago to deliberately inflate the economy by keeping interest rates artificially low in an attempt to boost consumer spending.  In order to sustain demand in the flagging economy after the .com crash of 2000, Gordon and Eddie fiddled inflation figures and cut interest rates, desperate to keep the only remaining glimmer of hope alive - high street spending.  The side effects of this have been rampant inflation and an unsustainable boom in house prices, which now it seems can only end in tears for Gordon and the country.

“But we knew that we were having to stimulate consumer spending; we knew we had pushed it up to levels which couldn’t possibly be sustained into the medium and long term.“But for the time being, if we had not done that the UK economy would have gone into recession just as has the United States.

“That pushed up house prices, it increased household debt … my legacy to the MPC if you like has been ’sort that out’.”

He told the Treasury Select Committee - investigating the record of the first decade of the MPC: “We had to take action that on the whole we would prefer not to: stimulating consumer demand because all the other elements of demand had fallen away.

“And we were very conscious of the fact that that could give rise to problems in the future.

“We tried very hard not to do more than we needed to to keep within the inflation target limits but we knew that that was going to cause problems later on which are still with us.”

Gordon and the MPC have left us in a desperate situation of spiralling inflation and massive consumer and business debt.  There is only one way this can all end, and it won’t be pretty.

Seems as if Gordon is coming under heavy fire again today, in the lead up to his big budget speech tomorrow.  And as the country prepares to breathe a collective sigh of relief that the “Iron Chancellor” won’t be at the treasury much longer to do any more damage, there are plenty who can’t resist sticking the knife in.

Not exactly surprising too, given that inflation appears to be spiralling ever more out of control as RPI hit 4.6% this month, it’s highest in over 11 years, and further out of kilter with interest rates than we have ever seen before.  Even the fiddled CPI measure jumped to 2.8%, despite the fact that it now includes such ridiculous items as mobile phone ringtones, presumably because the Office for National Statistics expects them to come down in price soon.

Edmund Conway in the Telegraph warns of the danger ahead as Gordon’s tax burden continues to shoot up, killing Britain’s international competetiveness:

But the most worrying accusation levelled at the Chancellor is that, as part of this fiscal expansion, he has clogged up the arteries of commerce with unnecessary and excessive taxes and regulations.

The tax burden recently soared to the highest level since the mid-1980s, while businesses calculate that since 1998 the cumulative cost of government red tape has climbed to £55bn.

Significantly, these changes have come at precisely the time when almost every other major economy is doing exactly the opposite. Ireland has boosted its growth and wealth dramatically by cutting taxes and regulations on businesses, and even countries such as Germany that are associated with high rates are slimming down more than Britain.

In short, under Mr Brown, the UK has gone from being a relatively low-tax economy to being a high-tax economy.

The effects of this change take years to pan out: companies gradually realise that they would be better off building their next factory in another country, foreign investment slowly dries up, economic growth slows and unemployment rises.

Worryingly, the first of these things is already happening. A recent survey from the CBI showed that one in five top UK companies is considering moving abroad.

The Institute of Directors, the accountancy firm Ernst & Young and the think tank Reform all warned recently that Britain was losing its competitiveness, and fast.

Even more surprisingly, perhaps, is the scathing attack launched on Brown by Lord Turnbull, Gordon’s “Sir Humphrey”  - former permanent secretary to the treasury.  Gordon, he says, has a “Stalinist ruthlessness” and treats colleagues with “more or less complete contempt”.

He cannot allow them any serious discussion about priorities. His view is that it is just not worth it and ‘they will get what I decide’. And that is a very insulting process,” Lord Turnbull said.

“Do those ends justify the means? It has enhanced Treasury control, but at the expense of any government cohesion and any assessment of strategy. You can choose whether you are impressed or depressed by that, but you cannot help admire the sheer Stalinist ruthlessness of it all.”

“The chancellor has a Macavity quality. He is not there when there is dirty work to be done.”

The article’s author even goes so far as to suggest that Gordon might not actually be a very good prime minister, given these qualities!

Lord Turnbull’s comments will raise fresh doubts about whether Mr Brown is prime ministerial material and will be ammunition for the Tories at a time when the opinion polls suggest the public is wary of Mr Brown.

While senior Labour figures admire the Chancellor’s intellectual ability and his political authority they are worried about his ability to run a team and to delegate.

Gordon Brown will clock up a century later this week in his budget speech as he announces his 100th tax increase since coming to office.  Gordon has already put up taxes 99 times as chancellor to pay for his public sector spending splurge, but more is likely to be on the way on Wednesday.

George Osborne, the shadow chancellor, said that on past form there would be “stealth tax rise number 100″ in the Budget, even though Britain already had the highest tax burden in its history.

“These 99 stealth tax rises have made our economy less competitive and hit family incomes hard,” he said.

“They are part of the reason people are feeling the pinch as our real living standards fall. Even more depressing is that so many people look at the state of our public services and ask: where has all my money gone?'’

The tax burden in britain is now 42.7% of GDP, up from 39.5% 10 years ago, one of the biggest increases in the western world, and yet our standard of living has barely improved.  The next big question is: can Gordon do as much damage from number 10 as he has done in number 11?