Saturday, November 24, 2012

Has This Government and Ed Davey Lost the Plot?

People are struggling with their bills and the recent hike in gas and electricity are really frightening people and the government's answer to this is to raise the utility bills even more under the guise of Renewable Green Energy Investment? An investment with a cost not being met by the government or the Thatcher *privatised* utility companies but by the majority being forced to be met by the people of this country. These measures will fuel on average a rise of around £150 average per year!

"Earth to planet Davey" people do not have the money for this huge increase. Can he and this Tory controlled government advise struggling families, who are barely getting by now, how on Ed Davey's "green earth" they are going to find this extra money?

Liberal Democrat New Age Tory, Ed Davey, Energy Secretary, is a buffoon, he lurches from being "green" to "scorched" in half a sentence! Thanks to the Tory government's scorched earth policies, which Ed Davey not only personally supports, but has wholeheartedly endorsed with his voting power in parliament, people living on low incomes are already living in fuel poverty, while people just above them on the income scale are beginning to slip through the net in droves, and the way things are going, pretty soon, many thousands of "middle income Britain" will joining them!

Not only does Ed Davey appear to be flippantly batting away the enormous strain his policy will place on people already almost losing the fight to manage their household expenses, he also ignores the consequences his proposals will have on small businesses, who are already struggling to pay the soaring cost of utilities! The rising cost of utilities are the main cause of rising costs for 45% of small companies. If these businesses want to remain in business then many have no other alternative but to pass their price hikes onto the consumer. It's a vicious circle. When this happens the consumer is left with even less to spend, and consumer confidence is hit still further, local economies take a pounding and this in turn feeds into the general economy, which then adversely affects supply and demand. No demand, equals no growth, and no growth, equals recession and already economics experts are predicting we will enter a triple dip recession in the New Year! You do not have to be economics professors Joseph Stieglitz or David Blanchflower etc to understand this, and What sparked this downward spiral into the abyss in consumer spending (or lack of) off? Answer: The fiscally illiterate Conservative Chancellor, George Osborne and his massive hike in VAT, from 17.5% to a huge 20%. Couple this with what will be the sacking of around a million public sector workers and the omission of their spending power in the economy, it's not hard to see why we are in this spiral of despair now.

The public are in a lose - lose situation.

Public services are being cut and are descending into fear, chaos and confusion and with no expert public sector staff to run them proficiently they are starting to disintegrate  so the public lose out in terms of excellent public services in the NHS, education and local authorities. The economy is also being driven into a black hole and we are being driven back towards Victorian times. We miss not only the excellence of the public sector w employee but we also miss the public sector's spending power in the economy, and their tax and national insurance receipts into the Treasury,and now have a rise in benefit payments to people that would have otherwise stayed productive earning and spending in the economy and paying tax and national insurance into the Treasury. And all of this because the eejit incompetent Osborne cannot see the fiscal woods for the monetary trees who has deployed a scorched earth policy towards benefits and public spending which is doing untold damage to the British economy. If monetary policy is supposed to provide the blunt instrument with which to "bash the economy into line", via interest rates and controlled inflation, then Osborne has by-passed the Bank of England's influence and gone out and purchased, not just a cosh with which to bludgeon the economy half to death, but a pile driver with which to bury the British economy deep into the Tory scorched earth's crust, and Liberal Democrat, New Age Tory Ed Davey, has supported these measures at every opportunity he possibly could by voting with the fiscally illiterate Tory government. Davey is currently aiding the Tory government in their production of scorched earth economic "suicide pills", which we will all need if this incompetent government is allowed to keep blundering through the echelons of the British economy, if they are not stopped - and soon - then there will be precious little to save and it will not be MPs, banksters and corporate friends of the Tory party and New Age Tory party (Liberal Democrats) that will be made to pay for it all - it will be us!

It's pretty hard to accept when today we learn that the Tory government have wasted £5billion on a back to work scheme that has totally failed to get people back to work! The only people this scheme has helped is the Tory doning, Tory supporting back to work companies this ridiculously incompetent Tory government have hired in place of the successful RDAs! Once again we see taxpayers money hemorrhaging out of the Treasury and into the bank accounts of the private sector companies like A4e. Of course the stupid government could have left the previous Labour government's Regional Development Agencies in place who were actually helping to get 100's of thousands of people back to work,  but no this incompetent government knew best - only obviously they did not!

Ed Davey voted to increase the rate of VAT and voted to raise undergraduate's tuition cap to £9000 per year. He has voted with the Tories on EMA which is penalising poorer sixth form students in their studies. He has supported the government in their attempts to privatise education and has also supported the Tory government on the their controversial Health & Social care bill (now an Act of Parliament) which is currently destroying and privatising the NHS and he has also voted for regional NHS pay. (Delicious irony fact - how about we vote for regional MPs pay?)

Now the New Age Tory (Liberal Democrat) party with their multi coloured political swap shop pullovers and rosettes, are not only are helping the Conservatives batter those on benefits and low incomes into submission with the threat of fear destitution via sanctions to benefits etc, but they seem to think these "scum benefit scroungers" people fall into two categories "undeserving poor" and "deserving poor", the former being oversubscribed, and the latter barely in operation! Astonishingly the multi faceted political chameleons now want to put an even bigger strain on the "scum scrounger benefit cheats" *people* (who they have forgotten are actual human beings) via their utility bills and they are supporting the Conservatives who were the political party under former prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, who sold off this country's utilities, to France, Germany and tried to privatise anything that wasn't nailed down.

If only "Sid" could see what his backing of the Tory government's privatisation and sell off of shares in British Gas in 1986, would do to the ordinary "working man" in 2012, under the guise of a coalition government which would have been more at home in Hitler's Germany. No doubt his "hiss" would have rapidly been reduced to a pfft!

As usual back then, just as it is undoubtedly is now the shareholders who benefit out of our  public companies and our public services. During and after the battering of Thatcher, you were probably a Tory if you had at least a spare £1,350 for a 100 shares in British gas and in 1986 £1,350 was a huge amount for ordinary families to find and was completely out of most people's reach! Of course some ordinary people bought into the scheme, but it was foreign investors who purchased the biggest number of shares giving them control of our gas (and electricity) companies, which is underpinning the problems we are all experiencing with escalating utility costs today. The same happened with British Rail and exactly the same is happening right at this very moment with the NHS, education and welfare! Are people going to really have to wait another 26 years before they realise how big a mistake this is, or will they learn the lessons of Gas, electric, water and British rail etc?

When people had finally had enough and felt pushed to the extreme, Thatcher's measures led to the poll tax riots in 1990, what will The Tories and their "New Age Tory" counterparts measures lead to in the not too distant future? The mood on the streets is turning uglier with each passing day, couple this with people's genuine feelings of resentment against being demonised by the British government, who seem hell bent on turning factions of society against each other, able bodied against disabled, employed against unemployed, young against old, private sector workers against public sector workers, neighbour against neighbour, healthy people against sick people, indigenous population against immigrants etc in order to get their draconian austerity measures through, it is not hard to see that the whole thing has become a  tinderbox just waiting for some "bright spark" not dissimilar to Ed Davey to set it all off. An extra average of £4.50 per week on fuel bills may not seem a lot to the likes of Ed Davey and Conservative spokesman millionaire Tim Yeo, but it may just prove to be the straw that finally broke the back of the camel of not only the poor on benefits and the low waged, but on middle income earners too and thousands of small businesses up and down the length and breadth of this country!
George Osborne, the chancellor, settled for a cap of £7.6bn in today’s prices on the framework by 2020 – a leap from the subsidy cap of £2.6bn for the 2012-13 financial year, rising to £3.9bn in 2015.This extra cost will be passed on to households and companies through higher energy bills - Finacial Times
It's all very well for the likes of politicians like Ed Davey to have principles etc and one may just be able to understand the merit of why this needs to be done, but it should not fall to the poor, unwaged and low waged of this country to pay for the benefits, that the rich will once again make a killing out of. We saw this with the sell off and privatisation of our utilities and railways and can all now plainly see the catastrophe that these measures proved to be for ordinary people and will be exactly so again with the Renewable Sources bill and is it is already proving to be with the privatisation of the NHS and state school education. Why should the ordinary people who never gained out of the Conservative government's various privatisation of our services, be forced to pay for them though the nose, just like they are being forced to pay now for the banks and financial sector's collapse?

Why should ordinary people who have next to nothing be forced to line the shareholders pockets and  bank accounts of Tory doning health companies, utility companies and banks? Especially while this dreadful government seek to lay the blame for all this country's ills firmly at their door, while allowing bankers to go unchallenged and uncharged and get away with their crimes against the people of this country's standard of living, jobs, savings and businesses?

The government's austerity measures are not designed to pay down the debt and improve the deficit (because both are increasing), but they are s designed to privatise everything in the country, soon we will have absolutely nothing left, it will all be in the hands of Tory doning private sector who operate for profit, not for the benefit of our people. It's true, it's happening and it is happening right now.

Mark my words, people are extremely frightened, they cannot physically bear or accept another attack on their finances or their standard of living and will not accept another huge hike in utility bills and this Tory government and their New Age Tory Liberal Democrat mates will corner scared frightened people at their peril!

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