“Hello, is that the IMF? Rachel Reeves here, in a bit of a pinch and just wondering if you could see your way to bunging us £51 billion… just till the end of the month.” That is the shameful, damning reality heading down the tracks at a rate of knots, thanks to the idiotic, spineless and frankly disgraceful way this Government and its emotionally unstable Chancellor is running the British economy into the ground. Yes, Great Britain, the world’s 6th biggest economy (we were the fifth biggest until our bungling Chancellor got involved) will be joining such economic powerhouses as Ghana, Bangladesh and Pakistan… the most recent fiscal basket cases saved from complete economic collapse by the good angels of the International Monetary Fund.
Because, as we learned today courtesy of the respected think tank the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR) moribund economic growth, a weak jobs market and the cost of Labour’s spineless, economically suicidal about-turns on welfare spending have had a predictably catastrophic effect on the nation’s perilous financial health. It’s worth pointing out here that NIESR is a distinctly left leaning think tank.
Our “Iron Chancellor” (stop laughing at the back!) is on course to miss her borrowing targets by £41.2bn. If she also wants to restore her once flaunted £9.9bn of headroom she will have to raise taxes or cut spending by £51.1bn. Or take her begging bowl to the IMF.
Those are the two options on the table for you , the beleaguered, bewildered tax payer she is making poorer by the day. Stephen Millard, the think tank’s deputy director, warned stealth taxes and fiscal tinkering was not going to touch the sides.
What was needed – and you may want to sit down for this – was an income tax hike of at least 5p in the pound.
Well someone has to pay for those gilt-edged Civil Service pensions, those poor, poor junior doctors’ enviable 30% payrise, and of course those asylum seeker hotels don’t come cheap.
Mr Millard said: “These are the really hard decisions the Chancellor is going to have to make, if she is going to raise the £50bn. Fiddling at the edges is not going to do the job.”
Me? I favour the IMF begging bowl option.
Last time Labour crippled the economy the IMF, who have no party political skin in the game, demanded public spending cuts, including reductions in government borrowing and wage restraint policies, as a condition of the loan.
In other words, we would have grown ups in charge of the economy making the hard-headed decisions Reeves and Starmer should be making.
There’s no getting away from it, we are in a real fix, and the student politics of the Labour front bench are SO far away from a solution it’s not even funny.
Never quite thought I’d say this but: “Come back Liz Truss, all is forgiven.”