IN FRANCE they march on the streets, they cut fuel supplies to the airport, they stop trains from running. Why? Because they object to a vertically-challenged president telling them they will have to work until they are 62 instead of 60.
In Britain, the government tells the people that they are going to have to share the pain of £81 billion in public spending cuts after the excesses of the banks. And how do the Brits react? Do they take to the streets? Non. Do they mobilise and withdraw their labour in protest? Again, non.
Instead, a Yorkshire mother of three earnestly tells a television reporter that we are going to have to take the pain “until we can get the country back on track”. The Anglo-saxon willingness to self-flagellate is stupefying at times.
Just what exactly does this woman think she has done to deserve years of pain? Did she parcel up crappy mortgages and sell them on like fish past its use-by date? Er, no, she did not. I do believe the fault for that lies elsewhere. Why is the country on some sort of massive guilt trip?
This must be the ultimate political wet dream for the public school boys now running the country. The whole country has been very naughty and now must take its punishment. Bend over Britain – you’re all fags now.
Posh Dave and georgeous George Osborne will be rubbing their grubby little hands together with glee at the big chance now to dismantle the welfare state, and don’t think they’ll stop there, the NHS is well and truly in their sights. They’ve let their mates in the City off the hook with the biggest wimp out of a bank levy. Even the Financial Times says it’s “timid”.
Let’s recap. The banks squealed for years the minute anyone suggested tighter regulation. Then they went on a financial instruments selling rampage and, er, cocked it up. Then they did what comes naturally – they asked (well squealed) for more money. From us. And they got it. The economy went into freefall and who is paying for it? You and me.
Enter George Osborne, stage left, pledging to extract the “maximum” tax from the banks to help repay the deficit they helped to run up.
A whopping £2.5 billion, or 0.04 percent of the value of their assets.
George, you brute.
How are the banks reacting to this? Well once the slithering bunch have finished laughing and then sobered up after celebrating the fact that they’ve screwed the country again, they will no doubt congratulate themselves at hard they twisted the collective nether regions of the Tories and their Vichy coalition collaborators (for there is no other way to describe Clegg and his sellouts) to get the result they wanted. Their highly-paid lobbyists, not least the disgusting British Bankers’ Association, have done their work well. Pity they can’t work for a good cause, like humanity.
Shadow Chancellor Alan Johnson has rightly challenged Osborne’s fatuous assertion that the deficit did not have to be run up. Osborne has failed to explain what the alternative was. He has also lied to the electorate about Britain’s interest payments, claiming that £120 million is building schools and hospitals in foreign countries who hold UK debt. This is arrant nonsense. There is some cash flowing out of the country, but nowhere near the amount Osborne alleges. Still, he remains unchallenged because Britain seems obsessed with birching itself.
Of course Johnson has conveniently left out some inconvenient truths. Not least the role the Labour government played in the creation of a massive debt bubble and the failure to institute a savings culture. All so they could lay claim to an extended period of low interest rates.
Ok, this is the bit where you get to beat yourself up. Borrowed against the house, didn’t you? Thought it was an investment instead of a place to come home to after a day working for the weirdo who tells you your work isn’t very good and you’re not hitting your “performance targets”, didn’t you? Thought you’d invest in a second property because property never goes down and your mate made 50 grand doing up a garden shed and selling it on after only three months, didn’t you? Maxed out on all the credit cards, didn’t you?
As Gordon Gekko says in the second Wall Street film to a group of students “You’re fucked. You are the Ninja Generation. No income. No job. No assets.”
So take a bow Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and co…it’s your fault too.
Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs rubs everyone’s nose in it by setting aside £236,000 per employee in “compensation” for the first nine months of the year. That’s a pay and bonus pot of £8.3 billion.
Stop birching and start marching, Britain. Allez!
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