Michael Meacher MP

Politicians do of course constantly use spin and deception to promote their self-interested slant on reality, but even in this tawdry atmosphere of lies and manipulation it still takes one’s breath away to hear Cameron and Osborne (the latter again today on the Today programme) trying to make out that their cuts programme is all about a fairer and more progressive society.   It’s actually the biggest and most sustained onslaught on social and economic justice since the 1930s, certainly magnitudes worse than the Thatcher era.   Just look at what we’ve already been told, bearing in mind too that there’s a great deal more yet to come (and the sleepy month of August when people’s attention is distracted by holidays has already been used to put out some of the nastiest surprises).   The evidence covers every aspect of policy as this shows. (more…)

This is a Budget full of untruths, half-truths and misleading statements.   It is not true, as Osborne repeatedly said, that it was unavoidable – the better option of deficit-cutting economic growth was discarded.   It is not true that the balance between spending cuts and tax increases had to be 80-20 (or more precisely 77-23%) – it could easily and better have been 60-40 or even 50-50 provided the tax increases were focused on the very rich.

Nor is it true that this is a ‘fair Budget’ as Osborne keeps strenuously asserting since the VAT increase to 20% is a regressive tax which will really hurt poor households, while the new impositions on the rich – the very modest increase in CGT to only 28% (not 40%) and the bank levy raising £2bn – are just peanuts for the super-rich.   Whereas hundreds of thousands of public sector workers, the victims of the financial crash, will lose both their jobs and their incomes, the bankers and the hyper-rich who were the architects of the financial crash will lose neither their jobs nor their incomes nor their wealth.   Is this what Cameron/Osborne mean by our being all in it together? (more…)