[Politics] The Labour Government

[Weststander]

Wait, so you turned against the Tory party because they decided they wouldn’t see hundreds of thousands of people lose their livelihoods and cause a massive economic crash?

A surprisingly number of people still believe thar, it crops up all the time during economy / budget ins.

Furious about Furlough and the Self Employed scheme in the pandemic.

Often they’re the sane people who say the World shouldn’t help Ukrainians fight to survive or provide foreign aid to the developing world.

It’s a strange world, when did the UK gain all these selfish folk? Victims (but they don’t realise it) of subtle Russian propaganda via Twatter/Facebook/TikTok/Reform?

 

[Weststander]

These graphs and figures are all meaningless. The true debt is about (I'm told) two and a half times that figure, but official figures are never produced. Any limited company that produced figures for total debt that excluded finance leases and unfunded pension liabilities, would be prosecuted to the nth degree for producing wildly and deliberately misleading figures. The government makes its own rules, and successive governments need to tell us what the true and nightmareish figures are.

They need to add in the unfunded public sector pension payments, and the undisclosed public-private partnership liabilites, to give an accurate and useful figure of the national debt.

Remember I’m an accountant too. Off balance sheet finance eg the horrendous PFI contracts, hidden from Treasury data.

But what the stats do reveal is that the silly argument of Tories creating most the state debt, whilst the rest of the world is fine, is fantasy. 2007 and 2020-22 changed the world economically. Only outliers such as exporting Germany or despised tax havens Ireland/Netherlands bucked the trend.