What would the Tories do if they won?
March 29th, 2010A tory candidate said to me the other day that she had no idea what Cameron would actually do if the tories won. I think we can help her. Ignoring all the bucket-loads of political point-scoring, there are two unimpeachable sources of hard evidence. One is what is now happening in Ireland where the Government is implementing a virtual carbon copy of tory economic policy. Indeed the last Irish budget was hailed by the Daily Telegraph as a role model for the British Chancellor.
The former tory Scottish Secretary, Lord Forsyth, who is now chair of Cameron’s policy commission on tax, recently announced to the Conservative Intelligence (a bit of an oxymoron) conference that “It seems to me that we need to be able to reduce the overall level of public expenditure over a parliament by about £75bn (a year)”. Now £75bn – just 1 year’s proposed cuts according to Forsyth – amounts to about 5% of the UK’s GDP. That is exactly what the Irish have just delivered – 3 slash-and–burn budgets over the last 18 months which cut their GDP by 5%. So what has happened?
The unemployment rate in the Irish Republic is now 12.5% and could well rise on the current trend to over 15% before the slump is over. The rapid meltdown in the private sector has been exacerbated, not mitigated – not surprisingly when the prospects of profitability for private investment are so bleak, but contrary to current tory claims that rapid cutting of the deficit will produce a turnaround faster. Mass mortgage defaults caused by unemployment and falling house prices are now forecast as the next stage of the Irish economic collapse.
All this is just in year 1. Forsyth is recommending his tory Etonian friends to administer this poison per year for 5 years, which would cut UK public spending by a total of £375bn or 25% of GDP over the whole period. That is almost unimaginable – it would amount to half of total current government spending at the present time! But once again that is exactly what the Irish Government now intends to do, shrinking the Irish State by no less than 25% within less than half a decade. Just think of what has happened in Ireland in the last year, multiply that by 5, and you will have some idea of what a Cameron Government is threatening to inflict on the UK. (more…)
