As Britain is about to tumble into an economic precipice, with the GDP down 0.7% in the second quarter, who’s going to keep her from going over the edge? Obviously, those immediately responsible for HMG’s economic policy, specifically Dave, George and Vince.
Alas, the attention they’re paying to the economy is rather divided. Dave ‘feels passionately’ about homomarriage (it should be ‘passionate’, Dave, didn’t they teach grammar at Eton?), George is planning the strategy for the 2015 election (I wouldn’t bother), and Vince wants to ‘send an important message’ by taxing wealth producers out of Britain.
The country is going to the dogs, and yet Dave finds the time to host a Number 10 reception for ‘members of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender community’ and, silly me, I didn’t even know such a ‘community’ existed. His promise? Not to get the economy out of the doldrums but to legalise homomarriage by 2015.
The election strategy devised with George’s help is clear: upon hearing that the institution of marriage has been debauched, the average voter will happily leave his place in the soup-kitchen queue and run to the polling station to cast a ballot for Dave. Good to know we’re governed by astute chaps who have their priorities right.
Now let’s imagine in a flight of fancy that we’re governed not by spivs with learning difficulties but by real statesmen. What would they be doing?
First they would establish the immutable, cast in iron, chiselled in stone objective – something to which everything else is either secondary or derivative. At this time of impending catastrophe this can only be getting the economy to grow again, the faster the better.
Sure enough, Vince talks about the need to combine what the spivs call ‘austerity’ with ‘a growth strategy’. But he doesn’t mean growth; he means printing even more worthless paper for the government to throw at the least productive strata of the population. George Orwell would have a field day with this use of English: Vince’s ‘growth’ actually means expanding the same policies that caused the recession. In Vincespeak, ‘to grow’ means ‘to contract’.
The way to promote growth is to leave more money in the hands of productive individuals and businesses – this is so elementary that anyone with an IQ above room temperature (Celsius) would see it even without the wealth of empirical evidence from all over the world. But if he actually looked at the evidence, he’d find it incontrovertible.
A government can only affect the economy positively by not affecting it negatively. Every (and I mean every) attempt by any (and I mean any) government to channel huge amounts of money from wealth producers to wealth consumers has sooner or later resulted in the sort of debacle we have now. The reverse is also universally true: the more money remains in private hands, the better these hands work, the faster the economy grows.
Nothing short of halving the state’s take from the economy would save us from disaster. Ergo, a statesman would decide, this must be done to achieve the immutable objective. No ifs, no buts, no fears for the next election. A whole raft of derivative measures would then have to be taken, the most immediate one the halving of the annual welfare budget of £207 billion.
Granted, such a step would have unpleasant consequences, but nothing statesmen wouldn’t be able to handle. Corrupted by decades of undeserved handouts, the mob would hit the streets, rioting, burning cars, smashing shop windows. Such mayhem would have to be stopped decisively and, if need be, ruthlessly. But then mollycoddling rioters isn’t what statesmen do at a desperate time.
Just as victory is the objective to which everything else is subjugated at wartime, so should be economic growth at a time when the very existence of Britain as a sovereign land is being threatened. We have a national emergency on our hands, something that real statesmen would recognise and then act accordingly. As a result, not just the nation’s economy would improve in short order, but also her morale, which will act as an important building block of future prosperity.
All non-essential expenditure would have to be either cut or, better still, eliminated. This would emphatically include Britain’s contributions to the EU and the IMF. The likely result would have to be our departure from at least one of those organisations, and probably from both. Real statesmen would regard that as a side benefit, not as a problem. They would realise that foreign trade means exchanging our goods for those of other countries, not swapping our sovereignty for membership in a trade-stifling protectionist bloc.
Well, let’s extricate ourselves from this fantasy world. Nothing of the sort will ever be done in the real world shaped by our spivocrats. At most, George will be thrown to the LibDem wolves, and Vince will take his place, sending yet another subversive ‘message’ to productive people to go and produce somewhere else.
And Dave? He’ll continue to ‘feel passionately’ about homomarriage, hoping idiotically that this will get him another term in office. Business as usual for the spivs. A disaster as never before for the country.