Maggie's revisionist meme

To the right is a Facebook meme (shared tens of thousands of times by cognitively illiterate Thatcher apologists) which is a wonderful demonstration of how delusional and revisionist Tory minded people have become about the Thatcher government.

In this article I'm going to stick to the task of rebutting the claims made in the Facebook meme. I have already written a much more comprehensive critique of Margaret Thatchers toxic social and economic legacies which can be seen here.

Point One: Thatcher didn't "abandon the Falklands to the Argies"

Declassified documents reveal that Thatcher and her defence secretary John Nott were warned several times that her cuts to the South Atlantic force would be interpreted by the Argentine military junta as an open invitation to reclaim the disputed islands. Thatcher ignored this advice, and in so doing, abandoned the Falklands to Argentina. Had she not made those cuts, no Argentine soldiers would ever have set foot on the Falklands. Essentially what Thatcher did by ignoring the expert advice was to provoke an entirely unnecessary war, cost a thousand young men their lives and cause injury and trauma to many thousands more. That Tories chose to celebrate this disastrous strategic error and unnecessary loss of life as one of Maggie's greatest successes demonstrates their abject disregard for both the facts and for human suffering.

Point Two: Thatcher didn't "cow down to the IRA"

I'll begin by noting that the expression is "Kowtow" (from the Mandarin Chinese for bow down or prostate oneself) not "Cow Down" (which for me creates the mental image of a hip-hop bovine grooving down to some funky beats).

More seriously; Thatcher's intransigent refusal to negotiate with the IRA ensured the continuation of the conflict and increasing numbers of attacks and deaths in England. One can only assume that these Maggie fanatics are glad that these people died, that they despise her successor John Major for softening the hardline stance and laying the groundwork for the peace process; that they must hate the contributions of people like Mo Mowlam who managed to get the various factions around the negotiating table; and that they must desperately wish that the peace process had never happened and that British soldiers, the police force in Northern Ireland and innocent civilians were still suffering dozens of casualties a year. There is nothing to this point but an appeal to tribalist hatred of the Irish independence cause which once again demonstrates the Thatcher apologist's indifference to death and suffering in favour of militant ideological posturing.

Point Three: Thatcher didn't "allow [a cherry-picked number] of immigrants into the UK"

This point demonstrates the Tory contempt for reality. They utterly dismiss The Tory party policy of closer integration with Europe and Thatcher's own role in opening up the UK to migrant workers and signing away sovereign powers.

Between 1964 and 1979 the UK actually had a long period of net emigration. This trend was reversed under the Thatcher government. The rise of net immigration, which began under Thatcher's rule, increased under John Major's rule and went into six digit figures when the European borders were thrown open to eastern block countries by the orthodox neoliberal fixated New Labour party.

The right-wing brigade love to claim that these kinds of open borders immigration policies are some kind of left-wing conspiracy, however the Tories have opened up EU immigration far more than "the left", which no longer even exists in terms of parliamentary representation. Thatcher's predecessor as Tory Prime Minister, Edward Heath opened up economic immigration from Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Luxembourg and Denmark in 1973. Thatcher herself opened the borders to Greek, Spanish and Portuguese workers in 1981 and 1986 and her successor John Major threw open the door to workers from Austria, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein in 1994. By the time Labour returned to power, Tony Blair had transformed the party leadership into adherents of Thatcherite neoliberalism (Thatcher cited this destruction of the left-wing Labour party as her greatest achievement in politics). The fact that Neo-Labour threw open the doors to eastern European migration is a direct consequence of Thatcher's rule. Given that Thatcher actually opened up the UK borders to further economic migration herself and the inexorable rise of mass immigration began in the 1980s, the idea that mass immigration is somehow a left-wing problem is fantastically revisionist stuff.

Point Four: Thatcher didn't "institute the Human Rights Act"

Firstly, the UK was subject to the European Convention on Human Rights long before the Human Rights Act came into effect. The 1998 Human Rights Act simply formalised these conventions into UK law. The ECHR was signed up to by Clement Attlee, with the support of Winston Churchill and passed into law in 1953 when Churchill was once again Prime Minister. The idea that human rights are a new thing introduced by Labour in 1998 is a pathetic fantasy.

Reactionary Tory fanatics seem to despise their own rights (the ones Attlee and Churchill both supported) and would love to see them abolished forthwith. Their favoured tactic for propagandising for the abolition of their own rights is to cherry-pick a tiny minority of cases where undesirable outcomes have resulted, their favourites being the inability of the government to expel Islamist extremists to countries where they are likely to be tortured and killed in contravention of the right to life (which has existed since 1953). They then use this tiny minority of cases to argue that the entire Human Rights Act should be abolished and that the UK should become the first country in history to repeal the European Convention on Human Rights.

These pitiful reactionaries honestly seem to think that it would be a great idea to allow Theresa May and the Tories to revoke our rights to stuff like a fair trial, freedom of expression, freedom from discrimination, freedom of association, protection from retroactive legislation, freedom of thought, the right to liberty, protection from torture, the right to effective remedy, the right to life, the right to privacy and protection from servitude. They really believe that all of these rights should be scrapped so that a bunch of millionaire Tories can decide which of these rights we are allowed to keep as they redraw a "more suitable" system of rights for ordinary British people. These people are so laughably naive that they'd openly call for the abolition of their own rights!

Point Five: Thatcher didn't "roll over and allow Europe to dictate what we can and can't do"

Again, this post shows breathtaking ignorance of Thatcher's relationship with Europe. Thatcher signed up to the Single European Act in 1985, which set about the creation of the European Single Market and codified European Political Cooperation and Common Foreign and Security Policy. Her chosen successor John Major then handed over even more powers to Europe when he signed up to the Maastricht Treaty in 1992. In effect Thatcher and her successor John Major did roll over, cede sovereign powers to Europe and allow the EU to begin dictating "what we can and can't do". This point simply reinforces the fact that Thatcher fanatics are brazen revisionists.

Point Six: Thatcher didn't "run up huge debts and end up getting our credit rating reduced"

This one is probably the most revisionist point of the whole lot. Despite North Sea oil production booming in the 1980s and the £billions raised through the fire-sale of state infrastructure (the national silver), the Thatcher government simply couldn't manage to run a balanced budget. During Thatcher's rule the national debt rose from £169 billion in 1978 to £570 billion in 1990! Despite all of the North Sea oil revenues and privatisation windfalls, the Thatcher government ran near constant budget deficits and massively expanded national borrowing.

What is more, the financial sector crisis that caused the runaway budget deficits of today can be traced back to Thatcher's neoliberalisation agenda. Wave after wave of deregulations, which began with Thatcher, but continued under Neo-Labour allowed financial institutions to gamble the entire financial sector to the brink of insolvency, necessitating the biggest state interventions in UK history to save them from the consequences of their own recklessness. The financial crisis, the credit crunch and George Osborne's failing ideological austerity experiment have all contributed to the escalation of the national debt, and all of these things can be traced back to Thatcher's introduction of ideologically driven neoliberal-pseudo-economics.

One other thing that needs to be said about this point is that it is illustrative of the Tory mentality of measuring the price of everything and the value of nothing. Their problem with the current economic situation isn't the huge rises in long-term and youth unemployment, massive rises in the number of children growing up in poverty, cuts to infrastructure, services and education, ever rising personal debts, financial sector greed and corruption, industrial scale tax-dodging or the fact that the government is led by and positively riddled with barefaced liars; it is that a foreign financial institution (that only a few years ago caused the economic crisis by stamping £trillions worth of toxic derivatives with AAA ratings) has removed their AAA rating from UK sovereign debts.

Conclusion "So before you sit there slagging her off (especially those who weren't even born when she was Prime Minister) take a look at what happened to our country since she resigned.

Many of the problems that have happened to our country since Thatcher resigned can clearly be traced back to decisions made by her government. I'll go through a few of her toxic legacies after a quick not about the parenthesised effort to so silence those that have suffered the consequences of her social divisiveness and economic mismanagement by whining that they weren't even born when she was ruling to roost. This effort to shut down criticism is truly feeble stuff, it's like saying that people shouldn't be allowed to have an opinion on the First World War unless they are one of the few hundred people still living that were children at the time; like forbidding anyone under the age of 57 from expressing an opinion about the leadership skills of Winston Churchill, or like preventing future generations from criticising Tony Blair and his desperate efforts to secure the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Here are some of the toxic legacies  that can be traced back to Margaret Thatcher. For a more comprehensive exploration of these themes, you can read the Margaret Thatcher is Dead article instead.

Neoliberalism - Thatcher was responsible for the introduction of ideologically driven neoliberal pseudo economics. Countless current economic problems can be traced back to the abandonment of the social democratic model in favour of hard-right economic extremism.
New Labour and political apathy - Thatcher once cited Tony Blair and New Labour as her greatest achievement in politics. To her, it was a great success that Labour abandoned their central ethos in favour of Thatcherite neoliberalism, but most people should be able to see that it actually resulted in the death of political diversity which went on to cause the spread of political apathy.
Centralised executive power - No Prime Minister has ever done more to damage participatory democracy. She stripped power away from local government and centralised in her own hands. This centralisation of power runs entirely contrary to all of her waffle about small government and no Prime Minister since has wanted to hand back powers to local government.
Manufacturing Decline - Thatcher relentlessly pushed the absurd post industrial fantasy, where the UK economy would more or less abandon productive activity like manufacturing in order to focus on providing services centred around the financial sector in the City of London. The industrial decline Thatcher instigated has continued under all subsequent orthodox neoliberal governments, and these days Britain runs record breaking trade deficits and the decision to put the gamblers in the City at the very centre of our economy looks ever more foolhardy.
Trade Deficits - back in the 1970s the balance of trade was considered one of the most important economic indicators, these days people fixate upon GDP, and the grotesquely distorted measures for inflation and unemployment and tend to ignore the fact that the UK trade deficit has been widening ever since Thatcher initiated her assaults on the UK industrial sector.
Mass unemployment - Thatcher didn't inherit full employment in 1979, but she reintroduced the near forgotten spectre of mass unemployment that hadn't stalked the country since the 1930s. To the Tories, mass unemployment was a price worth paying, and unemployment has remained high ever since. Another of Thatcher's cons was placing people on sickness benefits in order to manipulate the headline unemployment figures downwards. Even if people weren't incapable of work at the time, decades of inactivity and poverty on sickness benefits will have rendered the majority too old or infirm to contribute anything now. The current Tory administration are so cheeky that they resort to blaming Labour for the explosion in sickness claimants, when the policy of parking the unemployed on sickness benefits was introduced by their ideological godmother.
Social division - Thatcher was undeniably the most divisive Prime Minister of the 20th Century. She set communities against each other in order to prevent people coming together in solidarity against her rule. Where solidarity was shown she used the police as her own personal militia to crush dissent. Thatcher's industrial strategy tore the economic heart out of countless communities, then her government instructed those still with jobs to blame those without for the catastrophic failure of her policies.
Poverty (falling wages, loss of disposable income, ever rising personal debts) - Thatcher set about destroying several decades of social progress. The wealth gap began increasing under Thatcher and has never stopped since. Thatcher's socially and economically divisive policies ensured that the rich got all the gravy and the poor got all the blame. Not only did this wealth transfer to the rich have devastating social consequences, it also had appalling economic consequences too. As the value of wages fell, disposable income fell too and personal debt rose. Low disposable income and high levels of personal debt are two of the causal factors in the current economic stagnation.
The housing crisis - Thatcher contributed to the current housing crisis in two ways. Her hatred of anything social led her to attack social housing provision and to instigate the firesale of social housing and her obsession with home ownership led to the development of the massive property speculation ponzi bubble which burst so spectacularly in 2007-08.
Rent seeking parasitism - Thatcher's privatisations and deregulations led to the development of the "too-important-to-fail" model of capitalist parasitism. She introduced the policy of allowing private interests to put themselves in the position where they can demand ever greater taxpayer funded subsidies and charge ever increasing prices, safe in the knowledge that the state or the individual consumer will tolerate this rent seeking behavior and cough up incrementally greater amounts, rather than suffer the much greater economic shock of having their rail network, health service or banking system declare bankruptcy and shut itself down, or the greater personal shock of having their water or electricity supply shut off due to non payment of inflation busting bills.
Tax-Dodging - The Thatcher government set the great tax-dodging bonanza in motion with the abandonment of capital controls. That many of the people to have made themselves filthy rich through their offshore activities have gone on to pump £millions into the Tory party is absolutely no surprise at all. In fact the current leader of the Tory party is the son of a tax-dodger that cashed in on Thatcher's tax-dodging bonanza in the 1980s.
The financial sector meltdown - Many of the aforementioned legacies came to ugly fruition with the 2007-08 financial sector meltdown and the subsequent economic chaos. The contributory factors that have Maggie's fingerprints all over them include neoliberal pseudo-economics, the lack of political diversity, manufacturing decline, the absurd post-industrial fantasy, financial sector deregulation, the housing crisis, poverty, lack of disposable income, personal indebtedness, rent-seeking parasitism and tax-dodging.
The Murdoch Press - One final factor that simply cannot be ignored is the Murdoch bias. Thatcher opened the establishment door to Murdoch and in return for support in his papers, she allowed him to build up a vast anti-competitive share of the UK media. The fact that all current political leaders in the UK have to go and grovel ("Cow Down"!) before the Australian-American kingmaker Rupert Murdoch so that his criminal media empire might back them, is a disgusting spectacle that is yet another of Maggie's toxic legacies.

What we have learned

That this water-brained diatribe is the most popular tribute to Thatcher on social media is a clear demonstration that the majority of Thatcherites are callous, fact averse, revisionists, afflicted with such stupidity they would gladly propagandise against their own human rights.

The fact that the author of this meme couldn't come up with anything better than those six woefully poor points demonstrates what a feeble legacy Thatcher must actually have. The fact that tens of thousands of Maggie apologists shared this pitiful meme demonstrates the dreadful lack of critical thinking skills amongst tribalist Tories.

Another common theme with Maggie apologists is the sheer cognitive dissonance of their proclamations that she was such a great leader that changed the country completely and left a wonderful legacy, combined with their demands that we consider how badly the country has deteriorated since she was turfed out of office by her own MPs. They want to talk up her wonderful legacy when it suits them, but then immediately point at the radioactive social and economic fallout from Thatcherism as evidence that everything was better when their beloved harridan was running the country!

Here's my annotated version of the meme:

More articles from
ANOTHER ANGRY VOICE
 
Margaret Thatcher is dead
                      
What is ... neoliberalism?
                       
  The Great Neoliberal Lie
                       
The economic case against tax-dodging
                       
  The "unpatriotic left" fallacy
                       
The NHS is not safe in their hands
                       
  The warped Tory redefinition of rights
                       
  The catastrophic failure of "Osbornomics"
                      
Why I blame the left for the economic crisis
  

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George Osborne's economic extremism

When it comes to criticising George Osborne it is very difficult to know where to start. Perhaps the best place is his background? 

 Background

It should be quite clear (to anyone that is not a die-hard Tory tribalist) that George is unfit and unqualified for one of the most important jobs in the UK economy. He has a degree in History, some private sector experience of folding towels and simple data entry. He had a short and unsuccessful stint as a journalist before joining the Conservative party Research Department in 1994, establishing himself as a career politician.

He was a speechwriter for William Hague (the first Conservative party leader in history not to serve as Prime Minister) and he was retained as a speechwriter and adviser to Iain Duncan Smith and Michael Howard (the second and third Conservative leaders never to serve as Prime Minister). 

He then became a close political ally of his Bullingdon Club chum David Cameron. He was Cameron's campaign manager for the 2010 election, the fourth consecutive Tory leader to have failed to establish a Parliamentary majority, despite the fact that the UK economy and the ruling Neo-Labour party were in absolute chaos. During his time at Conservative Central Office the party has failed to win a Parliamentary majority in four consecutive General Elections.

In 2001 he was parachuted into the Tory safe seat of Tatton. Within years he became involved in the Parliamentary expenses corruption scandal, using public funds to fund his own personal property investments. As with so many other MPs, including his opposite number, shadow chancellor Ed Balls, he escaped punishment for his brazen abuses of the Parliamentary expenses system.

The only things that seem to qualify him for the position he holds is that he is friends with the Prime Minister David Cameron and that he has been kicking around in the Tory party for a couple of decades, by many measures the least successful period in the entire history of the UK Conservative party. He has risen to the top of a Tory party that is bereft of talent and competence. He certainly hasn't risen because of any noteworthy achievement in the private sector or public service, neither has he risen for his economic expertise, of which he seems to be desperately lacking.

Criticism

In this section I'm going to outline some of the many criticisms of George Osborne; identifying some of the many people and institutions to have criticised George Osborne's stewardship of the UK economy. I'll start off with my own extensive criticisms before moving onto to list some of the others.

Another Angry Voice

One of the strongest indicators of Osborne's lack of economic expertise is his tendency to make economically illiterate claims. Either these claims come about because he genuinely doesn't understand the very basics of economics, or they come about because he assumes the public are so economically illiterate that the absurdity of his misleading justification narratives will pass unnoticed. Osborne's pronouncements on the economy (his excuses and justification narratives) paint a picture of a man that is stuck in an extremely limited worldview of barely conceived libertarianism, supported by little more than confirmation bias. This worldview is illuminated by the fact that he tends to cherry-pick any data that can be worked into the narrative that his policies are succeeding. To give a couple of examples:

Osborne often returns to the narrative that record low prices in the UK bond market represent unprecedented levels of confidence in his fiscal austerity agenda, rather than simply being the result of unprecedented monetary policy (sustained 300-year low Bank of England interest rates and £375 billion in Quantitative Easing cash distorting the bond market). This conflation of fiscal policies and monetary outcomes is unquestionable example of economic illiteracy. 

Another example of cherry-picked data based economic illiteracy, is his talking up of stock market performance as a key economic indicator. The problem with using share prices to estimate economic health is that if the majority of corporations are using tax-havens and transfer pricing to avoid UK taxation (98 of the 100 FTSE100 companies use tax haven based subsidiaries), the more growth there is in the corporate sector, the greater the flow of wealth out of the UK economy! Tax-dodging is rife, meaning that this inflation of corporate wealth does not come with increased tax revenues. In fact George Osborne has been slashing corporation tax and creating tax-loopholes in order to divert ever more cash into the re-inflation of the corporate bubble at the expense of his own tax revenues. The greater the expansion of the corporate sector under this "low tax, lax tax collection" regime, the more problems Osborne is going to face in balancing the budget deficit.

Not only is it demonstrable that Osborne is unfit to be Chancellor of the Exchequer from his lack of relevant experience and the economic illiteracy of his pronouncements on the state of the economy, it is also apparent from the consistent failure of his ideologically driven economic policies. Osborne and so many blue tinted Tory party tribalists resort to their tiresome excuses, the lamest and most oft repeated being that "Labour wrecked the economy". OK, lets assume for a moment that the Great Neoliberal Lie is true, and that excessive state spending, not financial sector mismanagement and corruption created the economic crisis. This narrative still doesn't explain how in 2010 George Osborne and his neoliberal economic wonks at the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) were predicting 2.6% growth for the year 2012, yet Osborne's policies have led to negative economic growth of -0.1% for the entire year (a year in which the UK hosted the world's most prestigious and lucrative sporting competition). How are Labour to blame for this spectacular economic miscalculation from George and his team? Clearly they are not. In a previous article I demonstrated how naive "Osbornomic" assumptions about fiscal multipliers are demonstrably to blame for this flatlining of the UK economy.

Right, now we're past some of my major gripes with "Osbornomics" lets move on to see what other people and organisations have been saying:

Ed Balls

Firstly, lets begin with someone you would expect to be a vocal critic of Osborne; his political adversary, the aforementioned shadow chancellor. Ed is hardly what you'd call an economic genius, in fact he comes across as nothing more than a rather pompous political figure suffering from a bad case of bloated self-importance. When Osborne came to power, Ed set the Labour economic narrative at an unwavering mantra of "the Tories are cutting too hard and too deep". 

After 33 months of "Osbornomics", the sustained lack of economic growth demonstrates that Ed Balls was essentially right. This is a catastrophe for the Tories because "economic competence" is one of the very few public perception indicators where the Tories have a long historic advantage over the Labour party. Osborne's mismanagement of the economy has led to the quite frankly astonishing situation that Labour have completely overturned this public perception of Tory economic competence. The polls now show that Ed Balls and George Osborne are virtually neck and neck on public trust, with Balls actually eking out a slight advantage. What makes this shift in public perception so astonishing is the fact that it has come despite the Labour party presiding over the most catastrophic economic collapse, within the living memories of the vast majority of the British population. Osborne's inept management of the economy has led to the incredible situation where a clearly limited political clogger like Ed Balls actually looks savvy and competent in comparison.

The public

It is already clear from the decline in public trust, that Osborne is not popular with the public. In fact polls repeatedly show that he is by far the least popular Conservative minister, quite an achievement in a government stuffed with odious and highly unpopular characters such as Iain Duncan Smith, Eric Pickles, Michael Gove and Jeremy Hunt. It is quite clear from the polls that Osborne has become the biggest liability in the Conservative government. Not only are his economic policies failing badly, he has also introduced massively unpopular legislation such as the pasty tax, the static caravan tax and the 5% income tax cut for millionaires. His economic strategies have been described by members of his own party as "back of a fag packet stuff".

Osborne is rightly considered to be the worst Chancellor of the Exchequer in at least 100 years by an ever growing percentage of politically aware people.

Max Keiser

For those of you that are unfamiliar with Max Keiser's work; he is a man that has done more to popularise economics reporting than probably any man since the dawn of the television age. Max is a right-wing capitalist libertarian, the kind of guy that you would expect to support the Tory party, and approve of a man like Osborne that often talks up his libertarian credentials. However, Max has an absolute loathing for corruption and incompetence. Max has lambasted George Osborne countless times, including calling him a "bare faced liar" and a "shameless exploiter of public economic illiteracy".

It seems that one of the things that winds Max Keiser up the most is people who claim to be libertarians, but are actually more like adherents of Ayn Rand's lunatic pseudo-philosophy of pure self-interest and unrestrained greed. I'd put George Osborne firmly in the category of Randian neoliberals, those that treat economics as a matter of ideological certainty, rather than as a "soft-science" that is subject to interpretation and change.

David Blanchflower

I'm not really a great big fan of David Blanchflower, given that he is a die-hard Quantitative Easing fanatic (the Bank of England's own research demonstrates that it redistributes wealth from ordinary workers, savers and pensioners to the uber-wealthy minority). However, despite our differences over QE, our opinions align very closely when it comes to the failure of George Osborne's ideological austerity experiment. Blanchflower is one of the few mainstream media pundits to have picked up on the fact that Osborne's catastrophically inaccurate fiscal multiplier assumptions are responsible for the current economic stagnation (a point I've been banging on about since October 2012). He stated as much in an article in late January entitled "George Osborne is destined to be remembered as the most inept chancellor in British history".

 Vince Cable

Vince Cable is regarded by many as some kind of economic sage, because he was one of the very few politicians economically literate enough to forewarn that the "easy credit bubble" was going to collapse. In my opinion he's more of a lazy optimist than a rigorous economic thinker, he's always chuntering on about "responsible capitalism" as if huge financial behemoths can simply be persuaded to act with a social conscience akin to the religiously motivated social progressives of the early industrial revolution (Cadbury's, Bourneville, New Lanark, Rowntree's, Saltaire...). This is fantastical stuff, the only way that gigantic multinational corporate entities could ever be reined in would be through regulations and forced breakups of the too-big-to-fail, moral hazard brigade.

Vince is right about one thing though, his criticisms of George Osborne's economic strategy (or complete lack of it) are spot-on. In early 2012 a letter from Cable to George Osborne and David Cameron was leaked to the press.

Cable's letter complained of a dire lack of strategic thinking, here are a couple of quotes:

"there is still something important missing: a compelling vision of where the country is heading beyond sorting out the fiscal mess; and a clear and confident message abut how we will earn our living in future "

"we must lay out a strategic vision for where our future industrial capabilities should lie, and how to deliver it."

Nick Clegg

Vince Cable is far from the only member of the current coalition cabinet to have criticised George Osborne's stewardship of the economy. In early 2013 the deputy Prime Minister admitted that the coalition had made a terrible economic mistake in slashing capital spending. Here's what he said.

"I think we've all realised that you actually need, in order to foster a recovery, to try and mobilise as much public and private capital into infrastructure as possible."

This is quite an astonishing admission. What Clegg is saying is that that there was a spirit of collective ignorance of economic history in the coalition cabinet, that has now passed. The lessons from history are absolutely clear that boosting spending on infrastructure projects is a tried and tested method for stimulating economic recovery. The most famous example being the "New Deal" in the US, but the post-war recovery in the UK actually makes an even more compelling case.

What Clegg admits is that the entire coalition cabinet had been so enraptured with Osborne's ideological austerity agenda, that it's taken them almost three years to recognise these obvious lessons from history.

At least Clegg is now prepared to admit that the government that he is part of, bears the burden of responsibility for allowing Osborne to push on with his catastrophic ideological austerity experiment. Osborne recognises no such thing, and continues to insist that the economy is in fine shape, despite negative economic growth,, a looming triple-dip recession, numerous, record trade deficits, inflation soaring above average wage rises for 33 consecutive months and the loss of the AAA credit rating for the first time in over three decades.

Boris Johnson

Criticism from other politicians is not limited to the Labour opposition and the Lib-Dem members of the government. The Tory Mayor of London has also waded in to give his old Bullingdon Club mate a kicking. In early 2013 he urged Osborne to drop the "hair shirt agenda" and to "junk the rhetoric of Austerity". This is hardly a radical change of tune from Boris, he's been making similar noises since at least July 2012 (when I wrote about his agenda).

Boris clearly isn't as daft as he looks, the harmless floppy haired buffonery is actually a carefully crafted public persona. I'm convinced that he's angling for leadership of the Tory party, and by getting his boot in early, he's demonstrating to his fellow Conservatives and the public alike, that he's a true blue Tory man, but one with an alternative to Osborne's catastrophic ideological austerity experiment.

The CBI & BCC

Remember when that bunch of British so-called "business leaders" wrote that idiotic letter to the Telegraph cheerleading for Osborne's austerity experiment? Remember when right-wing business groups like the CBI and the BCC were cheering Gideon Osborne to the rafters back in 2010?

Well they've changed their tunes now, they still cloak their statements in pro-Tory language but the message is absolutely clear, that they now want increased government spending and investment, rather than a continuance of the obsession with cost-cutting.

You would have thought they'd be ashamed to make such a volte face, but it is absolutely clear that our so-called business leaders are a bunch of shameless bastards from the fact that British FTSE 100 directors awarded themselves a whopping average pay rise of 49% in 2011 while the rest of the workforce got a measly 1.4% increase (miles below the 5% rate of inflation that year).

The CEBR

Another right-leaning organisation called the Centre for Economics and Business Research have made a number of statements which, although thickly coated in the expected pro-Tory patina, clearly demonstrate the fact that they accept that Osborne's ideological austerity experiment is failing. In January 2013 the correctly predicted that the UK would be stripped of the AAA credit rating (hardly a remarkable prediction, since the UK's AAA rating was put on "negative outlook" by all of the three ratings agencies at the back end of 2012).

What is worse, is that they are now claiming that Britian's soaring budget deficit will not begin to fall for at least ten years, making an absolute mockery out of Osborne's intention to eliminate the structural deficit in a single parliament. Even his right-wing cheerleaders admit that thanks to Osborne's economic mismanagement, the deficit won't begin falling until well into the third post-crisis parliament, if not the fourth.

When right-wing economic foundations are predicting a lost-decade of low growth and rising debts, it's awfully bad news for a Chancellor that staked his reputation on rescuing the UK economy and eliminating the structural deficit over the course of one single parliament.

The OECD

The Paris based OECD like to describe themselves as the world's leading economic thinktank, however in February 2013 they pretty much admitted that they've been backing a dead horse in George Osborne. 

The OECD were guilty of ceaselessly promoting Osborne's austerity experiment all the way from 2010 through to the beginning of 2013, but then they suddenly seemed to wake up and recognise what a spectacular mess Osborne's been making. They have now joined the vast chorus of people and organisations calling on Gideon to slow down the rate of cuts, begin investing more in infrastructure and to focus more attention on creating employment and on protecting the poorest and most vulnerable from the effects of austerity.

The Credit Ratings Agencies

George Osborne repeatedly talked up the importance of protecting Britain's AAA credit ratings from the credit ratings oligopoly. To stake your reputation on the opinions of three such companies would seem to be bold to the point of foolishness. Remember these are the guys that that gleefully stamped toxic sub-prime junk with AAA ratings for the world's financial; institutions and pension funds to mindlessly consume. What's even worse is that they collected vast fees from the banks that created these toxic "financial weapons of mass destruction", a stunningly obvious conflict of interests.

Anyhow, the writing had been on the Credit Ratings wall since the back end of 2012, when UK debt was put on "negative outlook" by all three of them (Moody's, Standard & Poor, Fitch) and then on 22 February 2013 the UK was officially downgraded by Moody's, the first time the UK has dropped out of the world's elite group of nations (the ones rated as super-safe investments) since 1978.


What makes this so much worse is the way he ridiculed and chided Labour when the UK was put on "negative outlook" in the wake of the global financial crisis. Despite experiencing the worst economic collapse in the living memory of almost everyone, Labour managed to keep the AAA rating. That George has lost it, despite pinning his reputation on keeping it and after chiding Labour for being put on "negative outlook" looks like a truly spectacular demonstration of political hubris.

Goldman Sachs

Yet another financial institution to voice their deep concerns over Osborne's self-defeating austerity experiment is the investment bank described by Matt Taibbi as "a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money". One would have thought that Osborne's banker friendly stance would have made him immune from criticism from such an organisation, but it is becoming clear, even to the bankers he is intent on serving, that Osborne's ideological austerity experiment is damaging the UK economy and curtailing their profit making potential.

Here's what Jim O'Neill, chairman of Goldman Sachs Asset Management had to say about Osborne's insistence that ruthlessly cutting expenditure is the only available course:

"Based on my business experience, if what you thought was not delivering what you expect to be the outcome, surely you have to change what you thought a little. At a minimum, a repositioning of the stance, if not a full change."

The IMF

Perhaps the most damning criticism of all comes from the IMF. Not only are they the world's most powerful pushers of neoliberal orthodoxy they have also been recipients of £40 billion from the UK since Osborne became chancellor in 2010.

The IMF are notoriously hesitant to criticise the countries that donate the funds they use to force neoliberal measures onto struggling economies (via neoliberalisation conditionalities on their "rescue" loans). This reticence hasn't stopped them from criticising Osborne's self-defeating austerity experiment though.

The Managing Director of the IMF Christine Lagarde has been implicitly criticising "Osbornomics" for well over a year, here's what she said in June 2011:

"For the advanced economies, there is an unmistakable need to restore fiscal sustainability through credible consolidation plans. At the same time, we know that slamming on the brakes too quickly will hurt the recovery and worsen job prospects. So fiscal adjustment must resolve the conundrum of being neither too fast nor too slow."

However, when the disastrous economic data continued flowing out of the UK throughout 2012 the criticisms from the IMF became more implicit. IMF research released in October 2012 demonstrated that Osborne's austerity strategy had harmed the UK economy by tens of billions more than Osborne had been predicting. This prompted Lagarde to offer this more explicit advice in December 2012:

"If growth should fall significantly below current projections, countries with room for manoeuvre should smooth their planned adjustment over 2013 and beyond... This includes the United Kingdom"

Lagarde isn't the only one at the notoriously right-wing IMF urging Osborne to slow down his austerity experiment. In January 2013 the IMF chief economist Olivier Blanchard really turned the screw on Osborne, stating that:

"We've never been passionate about austerity. From the beginning we have always emphasised that fiscal consolidation should be slow and steady. We said that if things look bad at the beginning of 2013 – which they do – then there should be a reassessment of fiscal policy"

If the most powerful right-wing organisation in the world is taking the extraordinary stance of explicitly advising George Osborne to abandon his ideological austerity experiment, despite the fact that Osborne supported Christine Lagarde's nomination as head of the IMF and has poured £40 billion into their coffers, there is obviously something desperately wrong with his agenda. The IMF simply don't criticise their major donors like that.

Osborne's responses

It doesn't matter who is criticising him, whether they are motivated by political expediency or by the overwhelming evidence that "Osbornomics" is failing disastrously; whether they come from the political left or the political right; Osborne's response is always the same: He talks of there only being one true course of action, uses rhetoric to dismiss economic concerns, cherry-picks fragments of economic data to create a misleadingly rosy interpretation of the state of the economy and invokes soundbytes like "difficult decisions" and "sticking the course".

The evidence is absolutely clear; due to his economic illiteracy George has been reading the economic map upside down. For nearly three years he's been steering the UK bus in the wrong direction, and his only response to all the passengers and bystanders desperately shouting that he's heading towards an economic cliff is to waffle some incoherent garbage about how "we mustn't lose confidence" and stick his foot even harder down on the accelerator.

The fact that he repeatedly fails to meet his own economic predictions, casually makes £1.2 billion calculation errors and steadfastly refuses to listen to reason is bad enough, but the worst thing of all is that he seems politically untouchable. It doesn't matter how much worse things get, David Cameron is such a weak leader that he simply won't lose face by giving his old Bullingdon Club chum the boot.

There is one potentially positive aspect to all of this carnage; people are re-learning the old lesson that it is impossible to "cut your way to growth" (especially when you have an ideologically driven and economically unqualified man in charge of fiscal policy). Of course the lessons from this debacle won't last forever, anyone that had ever picked up an economics textbook (of the kind not written by far-right neoliberal free-marketeers at least) would know that the "cut your way to growth" experiment has a long track record of failure, it's just that people forget the lessons of history like the Great Depression of the 1930s, as those old enough to actually remember the horrors of it gradually die off.

Of course, Centuries of inductive evidence isn't certain proof of anything, however, one would have to be as foolish as the man himself to expect an economic illiterate like George Osborne to be the one to break such a long track record of failure.

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