Sunday 9th November

George Osborne is a very clever Politician; possibly the cleverest in the entire Cabinet, but sometimes he is just too clever for his own good.  He has successfully spread the lie that the last Labour Government spent wildly causing the Recession etc: even though only 6 months before the Financial Crash he was promising to spend as much as Labour.  No talk of Austerity then.  He has also lied in saying that the Deficit was coming down rapidly.  Well it was about £160 billion a year at the worst point and will probably pan out about the same as last year around £100 billion if not actually higher.  He propagated the lie that Labour maxed out the credit card; well if you say Government borrowing is the credit card then he has continued to use it for five years borrowing around 700 more billion on it.  (But I thought he said it was maxed out, so how come he can still use it).  He said he was cutting spending so that we would not lose our triple A credit rating, which he said would be a disaster.   We lost it anyway, but actually he has still avoided disaster.

And now the latest fib, that he has negotiated the latest EU payment to half of its value.  Well that isn’t the recollection of other finance ministers who were at the meeting.  They all say that the rebate was always going to be given, all Osborne asked was that this be brought forward and that the actual payment of 1.7 billion should be scheduled and not paid in one go.  They were happy to grant him this small concession but furious that he should brag that he had negotiated a reduction of 50% in the charge.  The charge and the retrospective rebate are two different things.  All he has really done is made it more difficult for whoever ends up being the next chancellor to balance the books.  This is really a fib too far, and almost all opposition parties are saying so.  Not that it will make much difference in the long run, those who support him will ignore the fib, and the others weren’t going to vote for him anyway.