BE afraid, be very afraid. There is no mistaking it. The figures announced in Alistair Darling's Budget are the worst you are ever likely to hear – except, maybe, for next year's.
If there is a commodity in very short supply it is not gold, copper or orange juice – it's economic honesty from our Labour Government – for even now they lie to us.
Last year, when some of the biggest porkies were uttered in Darling's first Budge
t, the Chancellor and his line manager, the Prime Minister, might have been excused for being in denial of the utter mess they had helped us get into.
But there is no excuse this time – the bare facts expose just how dilatory, complacent and incompetent the firm of Brown, Darling & Mandelson plc is – and why Brown's lengthy credit-fuelled boom is now delivering the deepest debt-ridden bust.
Compare what Darling told us in last year's Budget with what has happened.
Darling said economic growth would continue at 2.5 per cent, instead it has reversed and is minus 3.5 per cent. He said that to shore up the Government's finances he would have to borrow £38 billion, instead he is borrowing £175bn – more than four times worse. Unemployment was expected to rise to 1.8 million; instead it reached 2.1m this week and is still climbing.
When Labour came to power in 1997 it was gifted a golden economic legacy. The economy had been growing for six years, unemployment was falling and the nation's finances were in good order and improving. The national debt was £350bn.
Economic growth is now in reverse, unemployment is accelerating and by 2014 Labour's debt will have reached £1.4 trillion (that's £1400bn). And that's the optimistic outlook.
The great worry for us all must be that, like so many times before, Brown, Darling and Mandelson are being too hopeful by half and the economy recovers more slowly, the tax receipts are less lucrative and the expenses are greater than they are prepared to admit.
My fears are not the Scottish pessimism that Mandelson complained of last week – economic historians cannot find an example of a modern developed economy that has ever recovered from such a deep recession as quickly as Darling is saying it will.
Darling expects the UK economy to begin growing again before the end of the year and to record growth of 1.25 per cent by the end of 2010 – the impartial International Monetary Fund that does not face an election and has no need to talk up the economy expects the UK to remain in recession next year.
The political posturing of raising the top rate of tax to 50 per cent from next April might play to the Labour backbenches but instead of raising more revenue it is likely to see receipts fall as these more mobile people leave Britain or shift their earnings offshore. The strange but true lessons of history show that when John F Kennedy, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan cut the top rates of tax the richest actually paid more.
Last week, the independent Institute of Fiscal Studies warned the Chancellor that increasing the top rate of tax from 40p to 45p would reduce his tax take – Darling's response was to ignore this and increase it to 50p – the highest top rate of a large economy in the developed world.
That the Conservatives refuse to state this simple economic truism gives me little confidence that David Cameron and George Osborne have any idea of how to steer Britain out of its sorry state. Neatly aping the attraction for '70s retro fashions, music and TV shows, they look eerily more like a rerun of Ted Heath and Tony Barber in the early '70s than the unloved but effective Margaret Thatcher and Geoffrey Howe from the '80s.
Cameron in a skirt with a handbag? Sadly it reads more like a Damian McBride smear story than the dose of economic honesty that our nation needs again. Will any politicians tell us the truth?
From abject to absurdI have seen the retail future of the SNP and it was not pretty. This week I was in a Londonderry supermarket and happened to be buying a very small bottle of brandy that I needed for a sauce I was making in the evening. To purchase alcohol there, I had to go through a separate checkout with a longer queue.
Did I choose not to buy the alcohol? No. I put up with the delay.
If in Scotland in the future I were faced with this inconvenience I would either get my alcohol somewhere else or make it worth my while and buy more than just cooking brandy. Separate checkouts are an absurd idea that will make no difference to alcohol consumption and should be consigned to the bottle bin of history.
Cover upSo, crooks are now using the Google satellite site to identify buildings with lead roofs so they can rip them off, literally. Be warned. If you have a lead roof get it covered. More importantly, if you enjoy sunbathing in the nude waken up and cover up, there are people watching you all over the world! Your secluded garden is secluded no more.
The full article contains 884 words and appears in Edinburgh Evening News newspaper.
