Another Fine Mess

Starting as he clearly means to go on as Fleet Street's newest weekly columnist, John Prescott writes:

I hear Cameron and Osborne’s posh boy Bullingdon Club’s new members had an initiation... burning £50 notes in front of beggars. [Do Cameron, Osborne and Boris still turn up to these rituals? Still, no worse than the England football squad, each with a bespoke kit run up by a Savile Row tailor. What a touching act of solidarity in the present economic climate.] The PM and his Chancellor are doing exactly the same – burning billions to pay for their economic incompetence by borrowing £212billion more than they planned. We were supposed to be “all in this together”.

Now – as credit rating agency Moody’s downgrades their Plan A to fix the economy from Triple A to Aa1 – we’re just in it. Up to our bloody necks. Look at their record. They’ve choked off growth for nearly three years. Osborne promised 5.3 pc but we’ve only had 0.4 pc – 13 times less! Only two other countries in the G20 have done worse than us on growth since the spending review. Osborne delivered the longest double-dip recession since World War II and it looks like we’re going for the treble.

Living standards are in freefall with prices rising much faster than wages. Millions of working people are seeing their tax credits cut, as millionaires will see their TAXES cut – by an average £100,000. They’re bringing in a bedroom tax that will punish the disabled, armed forces families and the poor, while their country homes Dorneywood and Chequers are unaffected. As youth unemployment soars they’re axing a million public sector jobs only to replace them with a million low paid, short-term cheap labour posts.

The result is that Osborne and Cameron are even failing on the tests they set themselves. The deficit is increasing. The welfare bill is up. Their pledge to balance the books by 2015 is in tatters. They’re borrowing more than under plans inherited from Labour, which they described as reckless. Now our credit rating has been downgraded, which Osborne had said would be “humiliating”.

But still they blame Labour.

Like naughty schoolboys, Cameron, Osborne and Lib Dem sidekick Danny Alexander point at Gordon Brown and cry “it wasn’t us Sir, an older boy did it!”. But Gordon, with Ed Balls as his number two, kept us out of the euro, delivered the longest period of sustainable economic growth in modern times and kept interest rates low. And when the global economic crisis hit us in 2008, he stopped the UK from going into a devastating depression and saved up to 500,000 jobs and businesses from going under by saving the banks. He may not have been the world’s greatest smiler but by God he knew what he was doing on the economy. And as shadow chancellor Ed Balls has been absolutely right that Osborne’s Plan A for Austerity would kill off growth and throw us back into recession.

The Bullingdon Club used to smash up restaurants for fun. Osborne and Cameron are trashing the UK with the most reckless and idiotic act of economic vandalism this country has ever seen. This is a Chancellor who’s been downgraded from rubbish to absolutely useless. If Cameron can’t get rid of him it’s because his fingerprints are all over this failed plan. They’re the Laurel and Hardy of economics. But it’s another fine mess they’ve got us all into!

Well done to One Direction with their Red Nose Day single. But why put Cameron in the video? He’s already in his own Posh Boy band – No Direction!