In a gaffe which exposes the Thatcherite underpinnings of the government’s austerity agenda, Tory minister Greg Barker has boasted that vertiginous cuts are an “unprecedented piece of good housekeeping in British history” and claimed that “Getting government off the backs of business is the core mission.”
Speaking to an audience at the Moore School of Business at the University of South Carolina — from which he presumably thought his remarks would not be reported in the UK — Barker gaffed:
“We are making cuts that Margaret Thatcher, back in the 1980s, could only have dreamed of.”
Way to go off message, Greg.
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Excellent news, cut hard, cut deep. Reduce the tax burden on business and the working population by as much as possible as soon as possible.
By the way, there is nothing wrong with ideology, Labour used to have it as well but seemed to lose it around the same time as they lost their principles.
If only. Since when is a cut in the rate of increase in spending a cut?
Since Guido Fawkes was replaced by the economically illiterate Tory Bear. Bring the old tax-dodger back, puleeeeeze.
Net income = income – expenditures. Net worth = assets – liabilities. The coalition government is simply reducing expenditures to increase net income to pay off liabilities. The media seem to have failed Personal Finance 101.
However, while the political left has to realize that spending cuts are necessary, the right also has to realize that raising taxes are necessary, too; until both sides come to terms with these two prerequisites, modern Western governments will sink deeper and deeper into the ocean of deficits and debt.
@Trevor: Thanks for the economics lesson but the macroeconomics of the UK’s economy is a little bit more complicated than “personal finance”.
@Trevor, let me explain some of the complications to you.
It’s not just the size of the taxes you receive, or the size of the payments you make. Your total income and expenditure also depends on the NUMBER of people paying that tax or receiving that benefit.
Between 2007 and 2009 the deficit went from 33 billion to over 150 billion. And, importantly, that increase had nothing to do with budgetary decisions to lower taxes or increase public spending. You may have heard of the global financial crisis? It had the result that unemployment increased dramatically. Thousands of people stopped paying taxes and started receiving benefits. Instead of contributing, they became a drain (although of course they would prefer to work). Maybe you don’t have the boarded up shops where you live? Maybe you don’t remember Woolworths, Zavvi, etc?
So now, given the main reason for the deficit increase is unemployment, do you think that we need to close some libraries, surestart centres and cut spending on education, policing, etc? Or do you think we need to concentrate on keeping people in work and creating more jobs? Creating jobs isn’t easy, but we can be very sure cuts will have the opposite effect, and therefore the cuts could leave us with us with no public services and an even bigger deficit.
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[...] As we thought… [...]
[...] as if to devalue a ConDem’s discomfort, a Political Scrapbook blog has unearthed a video of Tory apportion Greg Barker vocalization to an assembly during a Moore School of Business during a University of South [...]
[...] But the main reason I will not rejoice is that I don’t think there will be anything to celebrate. We are as dominated by Thatcherism as we ever were. Thatcher’s victory remains almost absolute. The labour movement remains crushed. The political left – as it was traditionally understood – is virtually non-existent as a political force. Ensconced in Number 10 is a government “making cuts that Margaret Thatcher, back in the 1980s, could only have dreamed of,” as Tory minister Greg Barker put it. [...]
[...] the ‘big society’, but these appear to have been roundly ignored as George Osborne administers cuts that Thatcher could only have dreamed of. Blond is now reduced to making bleating noises from the pages of that great bastion of [...]