Two pieces of Good News
24th February 2011
Clearly there is and has to be quite a lot of bad news (for which blame Brown and Balls) but two pieces of good news are the decisions not to raise Council Tax this year, the fact that because of additional help via the NHS, the eligibility criteria for helping the old won't have to change and the large capital programme - the right way to get us out of recession in East Sussex.
The recovery, if tax receipts in January are anything to go by, is under way and the target reduction for this year of £31.5 billion REPEAT over £31 billion should be achieved, possibly even exceeded. But remember it is still a deficit and it adds to the National Debt year on year. The Government has got spending back under control, but even so it is still rising and almost certainly will have to go on doing so because of our ageing population. Thus in East Sussex the County even after planning reductions of £37 million will still be spending half a billion pounds! Nationally public spending is still higher than it was in 2008/9 (it would have been higher still if Brown and Balls had been in power) and it is going to go up from £696.8 billion this year to £737.5 billion in 2014/5. Fine, if the economy is growing and those willing to finance the deficit don't charge us high interest rates. But remember that this will take the public debt as a percentage of GDP from 62 per cent this year to 70 per cent in 2014/5 or £1.3 trillion. In other words it takes a lot of time to turn things around. This is Brown's debt mountain that our children and grandchildren are inheriting and yet even the most responsible of the last Labour Government only planned to halve the deficit over this Parliament. I have been reading the new Seldon book on the mess Brown made of things (and it is not a hatchet job, nor intended to be so). What it brings out is that Brown and Balls never really accepted the need for cuts and were prepared to go on increasing expenditure and therefore borrowing to protect a huge range of Government services. We all know where that kind of approach leads - we could have been in the same plight as Greece, Ireland and even Portugal, forced into much more severe cuts because those lending to those countries have lost confidence, and in the case of Greece and Ireland have had to be bailed out. Even Labour's Chancellor had no idea of where the cuts were going to come from as Brown insisted on deferring the comprehensive spending review until after the General Election. Talk about heads in the sand!
Our message has to be very simple and driven home. Not only is there no alternative to what the Coalition Government is doing, but had they not acted or had we had a Labour/Liberal Coalition, the cuts would have been far worse, because they would have been forced on us rather than planned - and we would have been paying a far higher interest rate on the debt.
Brown’s economic guru throughout was Ed Balls and we simply cannot afford his particular brand of economics. So get the message across. Never again must the Labour party be allowed to impose their disastrous economic policies on this country. 1931, 1947, 1949, 1966, 1967, 1976, and the years between 2008 and 2010 have two things in common, economic crisis and a Labour Government. True Brown had a banking crisis into the bargain (in part caused as the US Finance chief has just reminded us by Labour's light touch regulation) but that can be no alibi for the way in which he let public spending get totally out of control. We should not let him off the hook. Even without a world-banking crisis, Britain would still have had to pay the price for the Brown spending spree. You can run up the bills on a credit card, but there comes a moment when thy have to be paid. What is true of the individual is true of the Nation and it is Brown's credit card bill that we are now having to pay.
John Barnes
Association Chairman
Our Welfare reforms will make work pay
23rd February 2011
I feel that you might like to share the following letter from Iain Duncan Smith which confirms our promised initiative to make work pay.
John Barnes
Association Chairman
