David Cameron is lying again

In February 2013 David Cameron told an enormous lie about the economy in a party political broadcast. I wrote an article about it and circulated a few social media images and the Chairman of the UK Statistics Authority wrote to him personally to rebuke him for lying about the economy.

Just a few weeks later and he's at it again. Telling brazen public lies about the state of the UK economy. This time he totally misrepresented the work of the Office for Budget Responsibility in a public speech. Here's what he said:

"They [the OBR] are absolutely clear, and they are absolutely independent. They are absolutely clear that the deficit reduction plan is not responsible [for depressed economic growth]; in fact, quite the opposite."

 This brazen misrepresentation of the OBR's research drew a stinging rebuke from the Chairman of the OBR, Robert Chote, who wrote a letter to the Prime Minister countering his lies.

Here are a few select paragraphs from Chote's letter.

"For the avoidance of doubt, I think it is important to point out that every forecast published by the OBR since the June 2010 Budget has incorporated the widely held assumption that tax increases and spending cuts reduce economic growth in the short term."

"[We believe that] the consolidation measures put in place by the previous and current governments would have been sufficient to reduce GDP in 2011-12 by around 1.4%."

"To summarise, we believe that fiscal consolidation measures have reduced economic growth over the past couple of years."

Not only did Robert Chote explicitly rebuke David Cameron for lying about the economic effects of austerity, buried deep within an October 2012 report from the OBR is an explicit admission that austerity could actually be entirely responsible for the flatlining of the UK economy. Unfortunately, nobody in the mainstream media, nor the opposition front bench picked up on this shocking admission. I wrote an article about this admission back in October 2012 when the report came out.


The facts that Cameron has been publicly rebuked for lying to the public twice in little over month, and that his pre-election statements about the NHS ("the NHS is safe in our hands", "no top down reorganisations of the NHS", "we'll cut the deficit not the NHS") are now widely recognised by the public as outright lies, suggest that the Prime Minister is actually a pathological and unrepentant liar.

Another Angry Voice is a not-for-profit page which generates absolutely no revenue from advertising and accepts no money from corporate or political interests. The only source of revenue for Another Angry Voice is the  PayPal  donations box (which can be found in the right hand column, fairly near the top of the page). If you could afford to make a donation to help keep this site going, it would be massively appreciated.

More articles from
ANOTHER ANGRY VOICE
          
 David Cameron's debt reduction lie
         
An entirely avoidable "Osbornomic" recession
        
 What is ... a fiscal multiplier?
          
Tory economic illiteracy
         
The Great Neoliberal Lie
         
Damian Green: A very public liar
         
A Coalition of Lying Thieving Bastards
         
The catastrophic failure of "Osbornomics"