George Osborne is quitting as an MP

George Osborne was never even remotely qualified to serve as Chancellor of the Exchequer. Before he used his family connections to work his way into the Tory party elite he had only ever done two jobs in the real word, a spot of towel re-folding at Selfridges and some simple data entry work for the NHS.

When the Lib-Dems enabled the Tories to sneak back into power in 2010 Osborne's economic incompetence was unleashed on the nation. He repeatedly promised that his bonkers evidence-denying austerity agenda would clear the entire budget deficit by 2015.

Of course he failed. He failed spectacularly. It was well before the 2015 General Election where his level of public borrowing (measured as a % of GDP) exceeded the public borrowing of every single Labour government in history combined.

In the run up to the 2015 General Election the mainstream press gave the Tories a total free pass on this inept failure to deliver their number one headline policy objective of eradicating the budget deficit, instead allowing them to redefine their pathetic failure as a glorious success by letting the boast "we've cut the deficit by a third" and letting it go totally unchallenged.

The Labour shadow chancellor Ed Balls did more than anyone to help his mate George Osborne out by devising the weakest, least inspiring Labour Party election campaign imaginable.

On paper Balls had one of the easiest jobs in politics; making himself appear more economically competent than the floundering, target-missing economic illiterate George Osborne. However instead of opposing Osborne's economically ruinous austerity agenda outright, and pointing out all of Osborne's excess borrowing, missed targets and failed objectives, Balls decided to meekly imitate Osborne's austerity agenda with austerity-lite.

Ed Balls suffered the humiliation of losing his seat in parliament, but Osborne survived to continue his socially and economically devastating austerity agenda, unhindered even by Lib-Dem enablers like Vince Cable and Danny Alexander.

By the time Osborne leaves the House of Commons for the last time the deficit will still not have been cleared, and nowhere near it. The most recent Tory predictions admit that the deficit won't be cleared even by 2021, so that's 11+ years to achieve what they said they would do in under 5!

If Theresa May is reelected in June 2017 and then sets about marching the UK off a "no deal" Brexit cliff edge Osborne's promise to clear the deficit by 2015 will obviously be missed my even further.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies estimate that a cliff edge "no deal" Brexit would wipe between 6.3% and 9.5% off the UK's GDP, making it a much bigger economic hit than the 2007-08 global financial sector insolvency crisis that we've still not recovered from thanks in a large part to George Osborne's ideologically driven ineptitude.

Unfortunately the appalling social and economic legacies of George Osborne's ideologically driven austerity agenda will continue to haunt the UK long after he's gone, and the hard-right press will continue filling gullible idiots' minds with the bizarely counter-factual economic fairy story that the Tories are the party of economic competence!

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