the brilliantly leaping gazelle

Does the chancellor, Not Denis, remind anyone else of Malekith, leader of the Dark Elves and Thors adversary in the 2009 film?  Either way, the mini-budget was indeed mini. There are substantial challenges facing Britain, challenges he failed to address and the biggest challenge of them all is getting even more challenging with every passing day.

The national debt in the UK is the kind of debt which has little realistic chance of ever marginally, let alone significantly, reduced if things remain as they are. How and why we found ourselves in this mess is of less importance as to finding ways to clean it up. Unfortunately, we don’t have any politicians equal to the task of doing so. And even if we did, there appears to be little for them to gain by attempting to so. The public share in the blame for this.

Remember the furore surrounding the Two Child Benefit Cap (TCBC)? It sums up the perfectly the contradictory nature of the public, as well as the moral degeneracy of not just some Labour politicians, but also of the ‘liberal’ media.   A quick recap.

Introduced in April 2017, the TCBC did exactly as its name suggests; it put a cap on the amount of children that a family could claim benefits for. It didn’t cut the benefits that the family were already receiving, nor did it affect their entitlement to claim other benefits if they had two children. What it did do was make it clear if that they had any more children, no state aid would be forthcoming.

Labour politicians were appalled. They were not alone. Those in society who had built a very lucrative career out of telling people exactly how appalled they should be, were similarly appalled. Newspapers, think-tanks, charities and academics were united in condemning a vindictive policy that only succeeded in causing child poverty they bloviated.  When Labour returned to government, it initially resisted calls to abolish it, but caved in to concerted pressure from it’s own MP’s and the outrage generators

It conveniently slipped their attention that when the TCBC was announced in 2015, announced with the implications made abundantly clear, it was made also clear that it was to be implemented two years later, in April 2017. So if anyone was to blame for putting children into poverty, it was their parents. But abolished it was and now, theoretically, there isn’t any limit on the amount of children they can have.

But there still remains the unanswered question of who’s going to pay for all this largesse? Can the state afford it. And even if it could, should it? The economy isn’t growing. More people are off sick and claiming benefits than ever before, and most of those who are in work are so poorly paid, that they receive benefits too. Tax credits and housing benefit to name but two.I don’t know exactly how many there are, but I’d bet the number of people in work and not receiving any state benefit is so small it can’t be calculated. And wonderfully, or depressingly, it can’t. I just Googled ‘ what is the number of people in the UK that are in work and not receiving any state benefits’ and got nothing.

OK, time for real Halloween scares ‘Total UK government debt hits £3tn for first time’ The interest on that alone is around £115 billions a year. It is one of the top five government expenses, 8% or more than the government spends transport, housing and defence combined. Since April, the government has borrowed £97.8 billions, adding even more debt to pile.

The only thing thats growing in the UK at the moment – other than the national debt – is this governments delusion.