Sunday 11 January 2009

Dave don't got no clue (8)

Our Dave was busily airing his general uselessness on The Andrew Marr Show* again this morning:

You can pick and choose a few vaguely promising bits, e.g.

Look, I believe in cutting people's taxes. It's one of the reasons I'm in politics, is to leave people with more of their own money to spend as they choose.. I have an alternative. I mean I think that's what's interesting about politics now: you've got two parties with a very different vision... we have a different approach, which is to say the government has got to tighten its own belt...

Hurray. but here are some of the bits I edited out of that highly selective quote:

My alternative is that the VAT cut was a big mistake - twelve and a half billion pounds really wasted. This week, the Head of Marks and Spencer's, the Head of Next, the former Trade Minister Digby Jones all saying this was a waste.

D'oh! Retailers are falling like nine pins, I am sure that some of that £12.5 billion will make the difference between survival and administration for some; the ones that would have been profitable anyway are now a tad more profitable (and so pay more in corporation tax); for the ones who were going to fail anyway, it's not really a tax cut at all, because once they are in administration, HMRC are nowadays just an unsecured creditor like everybody else and don't get the full amount of what they were hoping for anyway.

And of course do not overlook that it is the entire services sector that has benefitted from the VAT cut - be that car mechanics, solicitors or cinemas.

... government spending should go up, but it should go up by less than Labour plan, and we'd use that money to help savers. There are 18 million people in this country who get some income from saving... This year, the Government's going to spend £620 billion. Next year, they plan to spend £650 billion - an increase of 30. What we're saying is don't cut the total. Increase it, but not by 30 billion but by 25 billion. I think it's perfectly acceptable to say that's an increase, but we're going to trim the increase and use that 5 billion, 4 billion of it to cut the taxes on savings and the rest of it we'll spend in another way.

Dude, WTF?

His alternative vision is one where the government 'only' spunks £645 billion up the wall and not £650 billion? And use that to buy the votes off savers, who would benefit, by his maths by about £200 each? If you can buy votes for £200 each, you'd only have to cut government spending by about £10 billion to get everybody to vote for you.

* Please note "The Andrew Marr Show" must be credited if any part of this transcript is used.

6 comments:

Witterings from Witney said...

Mark,

I have to say that those of us, with a brain, knew that from the outset!

Lola said...

I couldn't bring myself to listen to this bollox. What the bloody hell don;t they get about tax cuts = prosperity. I reckon getting Cameron rather than Davis was a huge error.

Anonymous said...

Lola,

The Conservatives should be walking this. 3% lead? Are they kidding?

The problem is that they just had no depth of knowledge about economics, finance or anything else beyond a load of warm-sounding PR.

They should be trouncing Labour, making arguments about all the things Labour did wrong that are now causing the mess we're in from high levels of borrowing to poor regulation through the FSA. Instead, because they know jack shit, they've just fallen in with the "once in a lifetime event" meme and are looking for different answers.

It's not surprising Brown is smiling so much. He's in control, and Cameron isn't. He looks like the serious man who will lead people out of this trouble, not Cameron.

Of course, they didn't vote for Davis because he seemed a bit grey at serious at the time. A bit too much of the "nasty party". But my guess is that had he got the job, he might have picked a far stronger shadow chancellor than George Osborne (who makes Cameron look like Churchill).

Mark Wadsworth said...

TA, I did follow the Davis vs Cameron debates at the time, and take it from me, Davis knows even less about economics than Cameron. In fact Davis appears to know fuck all about economics.

Anonymous said...

Agreed: "I reckon getting Cameron rather than Davis was a huge error."

Agreed.

That Cameron was the BBC's choice, tells you all you need to know.

James Higham said...

HMRC are nowadays just an unsecured creditor like everybody else.

Yes and the Tories need a leader.