George Osborne has finally been sacked

One of the first things Theresa May did as Prime Minister was to sack George Osborne. Given his appalling performance as Chancellor the only surprises are that it took so damned long, and that the woman who ended up sacking him was one of the only people in David Cameron's government who rivalled him in sheer bloody-minded ineptitude.

Over the last few years I've written dozens of articles criticising George Osborne and his ideologically driven fixation with his economically illiterate "let's cut our way to growth" austerity agenda.

It would take weeks to write comprehensive analysis of all of George Osborne's blunders over the last six years, so I'll just provide a few bullet points:

• In 2010 Osborne promised that his austerity agenda would eliminate the budget deficit by 2015. In 2015 he promised that his austerity agenda would eliminate the budget deficit by 2020. In June 2016 he admitted that eliminating the deficit would be impossible by 2020. In July 2016 he was sacked.

• In 2010 George Osborne staked his political reputation on protecting the UK's AAA credit ratings. Within three years the UK was downgraded for the first time since the 1970s.

• In his six years as Chancellor George Osborne created far more new public debt than every single Labour government in history combined.

• George Osborne repeatedly used his budgets to redistribute wealth upwards. In 2013 he introduced the hated "Bedroom Tax" in the very same week that he gave an average £100,000 per year tax break to Britain's 13,000 income millionaires. In 2016 his "Budget of Failure" came apart at the seams when he tried to hand out yet more tax breaks to corporations and the super-rich paid for through savage cuts to disability benefits.

• In 2015 George Osborne broke the all time record for the biggest fire-sale of public assets in a single year. These privatisations included selling off a tranche of RBS shares at a £1 billion loss, selling the public stake in Eurostar for £757 million (after the UK taxpayer had invested over £3 billion in it) and selling off the remaining 30% of the Royal Mail.

• Between 2011 and 2015 (George Osborne's complete years as Chancellor) the UK current account deficit got worse every year, culminating in an all time record deficit of £96.2 billion (5.2% of GDP).

• George Osborne repeatedly harped on about the so-called "Northern Powerhouse" but the whole thing was a sham. For every £1 per person in infrastructure investment in the north east, London got £24. Additionally it was revealed that 97% of Osborne's Northern Powerhouse staff were based in ... err ... London!

• George Osborne repeatedly turned a blind eye to corporate tax-dodging. In January 2016 he even presented a deal to let Google pay a 3% tax rate on their profits as some kind of triumph!

• During George Osborne's tenure as Chancellor British workers suffered the longest sustained decline in wages since records began.

• As a result of George Osborne's self-defeating austerity agenda the UK suffered its slowest post-crisis economic recovery on record. Back in 2012 the OBR admitted that Osbornomics was severely damaging the UK economy, but Osborne and the Tories persisted with it for another four years.

• Aside from screwing the economy, George Osborne also screwed the parliamentary expenses system by loading his mortgage interest payments on a paddock onto the taxpayer. He then sold the paddock at a huge profit.

This is a non-exhaustive list because there are plenty of other things too like lying about having no plans to cut VAT before the 2010 General Election, the pasty tax, booting reform of the financial sector into the long grass, turning up to parliament looking like he's on a severe drugs come-down, the Tax Credits debacle, shooting down EU legislation intended to clamp down on tax-dodging ..

Despite all of this evidence of failure and ideologically driven lunacy, George Osborne managed to stay as Chancellor for six years because he succeeded in doing the one thing he needed to, which was to transfer massive amounts of wealth from the poor and ordinary to the super-wealthy minority. As long as he continued doing that he was always going to get a free pass from the billionaire sociopaths who own the majority of the UK press.

As long as Osborne continued giving tax cuts to corporations and the super-rich and turning a blind eye to tax-dodging, the likes of Rupert Murdoch (S*n, Times, Sky), Jonathan Harmsworth (Mail, Metro), The Barclay brothers (Telegraph, Spectator) and Richard Desmond (Express, Star) were always going to give him a very easy ride.

I've been criticising George Osborne for so long it should have felt like a triumph to see him sacked and sent off to the back benches with no fanfare. But it didn't because the Tories are still in power and despite her tirade of misleading rhetoric about how she gives a damn about poor people and the working class, Theresa May has given no indication that she's going to change direction and ditch Osborne's socially and economically destructive ideological austerity agenda.

The problem with Tory ideology is that it's like a Lernaean Hydra. You can cut off some of its heads (David Cameron and George Osborne) but it simply regrows even more appalling ones like Theresa May and Philip Hammond to continue restructuring society in favour of the super-rich minority at the expense of pretty much everyone else.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

OR

What’s a bloke got to do in your job to get the sack?

The morning after George Osborne delivered his 2016 budget of failure he had an absolute car crash of an interview with John Humphreys on the Today Programme. After pointing out that Osborne had broken two of his three fiscal rules, Humphreys asked the killer question "What’s a bloke got to do in your job to get the sack?".

It's about time

The mainstream media have given the Tories, and especially George Osborne, countless free passes on their litany of broken promises, failed policies and outright lies - so it's about time they were held to account by somebody.

Take the pre-election "contract with the electorate" the Tories launched with great fanfare back in 2010. When it became clear they had broken almost every promise it contained they simply deleted it off their website in the hope that everyone would completely forget about it during the 2015 General Election campaign!

If the mainstream media had wanted to, they could have had an absolute field day with that story, but they chose not to. This meant that a hefty proportion of the 24% of the electorate who handed the Tories a majority government had no idea how much of a failure the 2010-2015 Tory led government was in their own terms of reference.

Broken promises

Just a few months ago in November 2015 George Osborne was crowing hubristically about his three fiscal rules. When he delivered his budget of failure in March 2016 he had to admit that he'd broken two of them. He'd failed to cut debt as a share of GDP and he'd failed to keep to his self-imposed welfare cap too.

Presumably he'd hoped that headline grabbing announcements (the tax on sugary drinks, more ISA giveaways, more tax cuts for the rich and his plan to force privatise every school in England into the hands of unaccountable private sector pseudo-charities) would distract attention away from the fact that he's failed so desperately in his own terms.

The budget deficit

Osborne's one remaining fiscal rule is the promise to eliminate the budget deficit by 2020. The problem here is that his own pet thinktank the OBR have stated that there's only a 50-50 chance of him achieving that, and they haven't even factored in the likelihood of another global financial sector insolvency crisis into their calculations, which makes them pretty over-optimistic considering the largely unreformed state of the global financial system.

To put this 50-50 claim from the OBR into perspective it's important to remember that in 2010 George Osborne promised that his ideological austerity agenda would have completely eliminated the budget deficit by 2015. This means that his very own thinktank say that he only has a 50-50 chance of achieving in 2020 what he promised to do by 2015!

The lunacy of Osbonomics

The idea that a combination of "lets cut our way to growth" and selling off the national silver at bargain basement prices constitutes a "long-term economic plan" is shockingly ludicrous, yet so many people seem to have lapped it up, and the mainstream media have consistently failed to question the bizarre macroeconomically illiterate assumptions that underpin the argument for ideological austerity or the blatantly cherry-picked statistics used to prop up the absurd Tory "economic recovery" mantra.

Simply assuming that all government spending constitutes "waste" and imposing across the board cuts (apart from a few ring-fenced areas like pensions, bribes for foreign states to build our nuclear reactors for us and bombing raids on Syria) is economic lunacy. A much more sensible approach would be to identify areas of government spending that create good returns on investment and spend more there, whilst cutting spending in areas that produce poor returns on investment. The problem with this approach is that the economic evidence conflicts so harshly with Tory ideology. Some of the best returns on investment include things that the Tories hate (spending on social housing, direct government investment in infrastructure projects and welfare for the extremely poor), and one of the absolute worst methods for achieving good returns on investment is showering the super-rich with tax cuts.

Selling off the family silver to create short-term revenues is so far away from being a sensible component of a "long-term economic plan" I think it would be deeply condescending to even bother to explain why.

Recycled promises

Osborne's recycling of his 2010 promise to clear the deficit by 2015 is mirrored by other Tory ministers simply recycling their broken 2010 promises in the present. A notable example is Theresa May's recycled 2010 promise to cut net migration into the UK to below 100,000 despite having overseen the biggest spike in net migration in recorded history in 2015!

It's absolutely clear that George Osborne isn't the only Tory minister who deserves to be asked "what's a person in your job got to do to get the sack?". Theresa May's track record at the home office has been absolutely dismal, endlessly oscillating between imposing right-wing authoritarian attacks on our rights and liberties and draconian half-baked family-destroying immigration rules, and Iain Duncan Smith's tenure at the DWP has been nothing short of a deadly, false economy riddled, repeatedly unlawful, desperately mismanaged shambles.

There are other staggeringly incompetent ministers in this Tory government like Jeremy Hunt and Chris Grayling, but the big mystery is how the trio of Osborne, May and IDS are still in their jobs after six years of such abject failure.

Who would replace George Osborne?
  
With such an appalling track record of failure, and his bloody-minded insistence on loading the burden of ideological austerity onto ordinary people whilst showering corporations, the financial sector and the super-rich with one giveaway after another, it's clear that George Osborne is fully deserving of the sack, but given the absolute dearth of talent within the Tory party that allowed a hopelessly underqualified professional towel re-folder to rise so effortlessly to the top of the party and stay there for so many years, who on earth would replace him?

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

MORE ARTICLES FROM
 ANOTHER ANGRY VOICE 
         
George Osborne's 2016 budget of failure
           
The pre-election "contract with the electorate" that the Tories want you to forget
                     
The Tory plan to force privatise every school in England
       
How gullible would you have to be to believe the Tory "hardworking people" propaganda?
                             
How the mainstream media frame the political debate
                
How on earth do people think George Osborne is a genius?
                      

Austerity is a con
                                
Margaret Thatcher's toxic neoliberal legacies
  

How on earth do people believe that George Osborne is a genius?

The other day I got talking to a bloke on the train. He seemed like a decent, intelligent and rational guy, but when our conversation drifted onto the subject of politics he said something completely extraordinary. He claimed that George Osborne is a "genius" and that he would be remembered as Britain's "greatest ever Chancellor"!

In this article I'm first going to provide a load of evidence to demonstrate that George Osborne is not a genius, and not the greatest Chancellor ever. After demolishing the case that George Osborne is a genius I'm going to consider how it is that apparently rational people like the guy I met on the train have allowed themselves to believe the ludicrous fantasy that George Osborne is competent, let alone a man of genius.

George Osborne is not a genius
    

George Osborne is not an economist. He's got a degree in Modern History, and the closest thing he's got to an economics qualification appears to be "O" Level maths, meaning that he's bizarrely underqualified to be Chancellor of the Exchequer.

After brief stints as a data entry clerk in the NHS and a towel folder at Selfridges, George Osborne rocked up at the Tory Party policy unit in 1994. Since he became involved in formulating Tory Party policy the party has suffered its least successful period in history, failing to win a majority in four consecutive elections.

In 2005 Osborne was appointed Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer by the then Tory party leader Michael Howard after the two preferred options (William Hague and David Cameron) turned the job down.

In 2006 George Osborne wrote an extraordinary article in which he heaped praise on the Irish economy for the scale of their free-market reforms and claimed that the UK should attempt to be more like Ireland. Just four years later, when he had become Chancellor of the Exchequer, Osborne had to bail Ireland out to the tune of £7 billion, but that hasn't stopped him pursuing exactly the same economic policies that drove the Irish economy off a cliff.

Since becoming Chancellor George Osborne has repeatedly demonstrated his economic illiteracy by presenting cherry-picked statistics in order to pretend that his failing austerity experiment is working. He often claims that low bond prices (caused by quantitative easing) are caused by his fiscal policies which shows that he's happy to present himself as a man who doesn't even understand the difference between fiscal and monetary policy. Recently Osborne has claimed that low inflation is a result of his austerity experiment, when anyone with a functioning brain should be capable of grasping that it's got far more to do with plummeting oil prices.

George Osborne's background is proof enough that he's not a genius, but his habit of desperately presenting any unrelated economic data as evidence that his policies are working, and his gushing praise for the Irish economy just before it imploded are absolutely clear demonstrations that the man is dangerously clueless.
                              

The failure of Osborne's austerity experiment

In 2010 George Osborne made a number of bold predictions about how his ideological austerity experiment would benefit the UK economy. The mainstream press has long-since forgotten about these fabulously over-optimistic predictions, but they are still available from the Office for Budget Responsibility (here) should anyone want to look at them and compare them with what has actually happened (here).

Eliminating the deficit: In 2010 Osborne promised that his austerity experiment would completely eliminate the budget deficit by 2015. In reality the UK is still borrowing £100 billion per year, meaning that he's failed to even halve the deficit.

Government debt: In 2010 Osborne predicted that the UK national debt would have reached £1.232 trillion by 2015. In reality it has risen to £1.489 trillion, which means he has borrowed £257 billion more than he said he would.

The size of the economy: In 2010 Osborne predicted that the UK economy would grow to £1.916 trillion by 2015, but in reality it is only £1.822 trillion, meaning that he's borrowed more than a quarter of a trillion more than he said he was going to, in order to make the UK economy almost £100 billion smaller than he said it was going to be.

Debt/GDP: In 2010 Osborne predicted that debt would peak at 67.2% of GDP in 2015 and then start falling. In reality the debt has reached 80.4% of GDP and it's still growing dramatically. This means that he's now overseen the longest sustained increase in the national debt since the Second World War!
            
The UK Credit Rating: Before he became Chancellor George Osborne staked his reputation on maintaining the UK's AAA Credit Ratings, but in 2013 the UK economy was downgraded for the first time since the 1970s.
             
Worse than Labour: George Osborne continually harps on about how Labour would threaten his "economic recovery" but what he doesn't tell you is that in just four years he's created more new debt than every single Labour government in history combined!
             
Earnings: One of the strongest indicators that Osborne's ideological austerity experiment is really bad for Britain is the fact that he has overseen the longest sustained decline in wages since records began.The fact that millions of workers are significantly worse off than they were in 2008 thanks to George Osborne's deliberate campaign of wage repression explains why economic demand is still so weak and the "recovery" so slow. As a result of Osborne's policies, ordinary workers have suffered the worst declines in income since records began.

These facts illustrate how much of a catastrophic failure George Osborne's ideological austerity experiment has been. The first four sections show that ideological austerity has completely failed in its own terms, and the last section illustrates the fact that the vast majority of workers have paid for this failure through declining wages and living standards.

How do people believe that Osborne is doing a good job?

Given that the actual economic evidence so clearly demonstrates that ideological austerity has been an abject failure in its own terms, how is it that so many people still laud George Osborne for his so-called "recovery"?

In my view it is not because they are stupid, it's because they're simply unaware of the reality that George Osborne's ideological austerity experiment is severely damaging the UK economy.

The mainstream press have refused to hold Osborne to account for his failed predictions and endlessly harp on about "the recovery" as if taking seven long years for the UK economy to return to pre-crisis levels is some kind of miracle. Not only do the mainstream press routinely ignore the fact that Osborne's austerity experiment has blatantly failed in it's own terms, they also ignore the fact that this so-called "recovery" has come at the cost of borrowing over quarter of a trillion more than Osborne said he would, and the longest sustained decline in wages since records began.

It's no surprise at all that billionaires like Jonathan Harmsworth (Daily Mail), Rupert Murdoch (The S*n, The Times, Sky TV), Richard Desmond (The Express, Channel 5) and the Barclay brothers (The Telegraph) are so keen to sing George Osborne's praises. After all, the wealthiest 1% are the only sector of society to have gained dramatically during George Osborne's austerity experiment. There's no way that media outlets owned by these people are ever going to openly explain how much of a failure Osbornomics has proven to be for the rest of us.

The Labour Party have assisted the impression that George Osborne is doing a good job with the inexplicable decision by Ed Balls to promise to stick to George Osborne's catastrophic austerity experiment should Labour get into power. This has left them in a position where they can't point out the obvious flaws in austerity without making themselves look a bunch of idiots too.

The refusal of the mainstream media to hold Osborne to account for his extraordinary failures, and the almost unbelievable strategic ineptitude of the Labour Party has left us in the situation where very few people are prepared to point out that austerity has blatantly failed in its own terms, and that this failure has come at a huge cost to the majority of UK workers.

Most of the people who believe that George Osborne is a "genius" who will be remembered as Britain's "greatest ever Chancellor" are not completely mad, neither are they Tory tribalists, they simply haven't been presented with the evidence that Osbornomics has failed in its own terms. These people are simply unaware of the facts, and live in a right-wing media enforced fantasy world where George Osborne is competent and all of his wildly over-optimistic 2010 predictions have simply disappeared into obscurity.

If these people knew that George Osborne had borrowed quarter of a trillion more than he said he was going to, whilst inflicting the longest ever sustained decline in living standards on British workers, perhaps they might realise that George Osborne is an ideologically driven chancer who has severely damaged the UK economy. Perhaps if they knew the truth they'd understand that he should be remembered as the worst Chancellor, at least since Nicholas Vansittart (who increased the national debt by almost 50% of GDP between 1812 and 1823).

The problem is that so few people are prepared to speak out and present the evidence that Osborne's ideological austerity experiment has failed in it's own terms, thus the ludicrous right-wing media fairytale that Osborne is doing a good job as Chancellor remains largely unchallenged, despite the wealth of evidence that he isn't.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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Given his appalling track record of failure, why do so many people trust George Osborne on the economy?

George Osborne's tenure as Chancellor of the Exchequer has been a remarkable display of incompetence. Anyone who tries to deny this is clearly extremely confused about economics, or they're blatantly lying to you.

The easiest way to prove that Osbornomics has failed in its own terms is to look at the economic projections George Osborne made when he first took office in 2010. He bragged about how he was going to completely eradicate the budget deficit by 2015, and how he was going to protect the UK's AAA credit ratings. He has blatantly failed to achieve either of these things. It has long since been accepted that there is absolutely no chance that the budget deficit will be eradicated by 2015, and in 2013 the UK suffered the embarrassment of being stripped of it's AAA ratings by the credit rating agencies for the first time since the 1970s.

The extraordinary scale of Osborne's borrowing is so bad that by the end of the 2010-15 parliament he will have borrowed £207 billion more than he claimed that he would. Under his stewardship public debt will have risen by 50% in just five years, meaning he will have increased the national debt by more than every single Labour government in history combined!

Not only has George Osborne completely failed to eradicate the budget deficit as he claimed he would, and borrowed hundreds of billions more than he claimed he would, the economy is way smaller than he claimed it was going to be back in 2010. Osborne's 2010 projections claimed that by the end of the 2010-15 parliament the nominal GDP of the UK economy would be £1,916 billion, however this has now been revised downwards to £1,788 billion. It turns out that George Osborne has borrowed £207 billion more than he said he would in order to make the economy £128 billion smaller than he claimed it was going to be!
If anyone in the real world would have missed their business projections by such appallingly vast margins, there is absolutely no way they would still be in a job. However with George Osborne the situation is even more ludicrous than the fact that he's still in his job despite his ridiculous track record of failure, because the public actually believe the right-wing propaganda about how much of a success he's been and rate the Tories as by far the most economically trustworthy party!

That Osbornomics has been such an appalling failure in its own terms, yet the public laud the Tories for their economic competence raises the interesting question of how it is possible for the public to be so completely wrong.

Economic fairy stories

The first thing to note is that a huge percentage of the public have no training in the economic basics, meaning that they are susceptible to the most ludicrous economic fairy stories.

One such example of a ludicrous economic fairy story is the endlessly repeated "recovery" narrative. The fact that the UK economy has only just recovered to pre-crisis levels in 2014 means that the entire UK economy has suffered an average economic growth rate of 0% for seven long years. The Tories and the right-wing press would have us believe that we're experiencing a remarkable economic recovery, but in reality we've just endured the slowest economic recovery since the aftermath of the 1720 South Sea Bubble!

Not only has the economy effectively flatlined for seven years, the majority of people have become poorer due to wage repression, cuts in in-work benefits, hidden inflation and the ideological assault on public services. The economy is the same size as it was before the economic crisis, but the majority of people are much worse off now because of the massive transference of wealth from the majority to the wealthy minority that has been going on under George Osborne's watch.

Another example of how people can be bufuddled by economic fairy stories is the way that so many people believe the economically naive idea that the only way to reduce the debt is to reduce government spending. In reality it is possible to dramatically cut spending and massively increase the debt (as George Osborne has spent the last four years demonstrating) and it is also possible to reduce the debt by increasing spending (as was proven by the post-war Labour government, which spent huge amounts on founding the NHS, building hundreds of thousands of council houses and rebuilding Britian's shattered infrastructure, and managed to reduce the national debt by 40% of GDP in the process).

The paradox of thrift has been known about since antiquity, yet still people prefer to think in really simplistic terms, rather than accept the complex reality that cutting spending on economically beneficial things can increase the debt, and increasing spending on economically beneficial things can reduce the debt.

It seems counter-intuitive, but cutting spending can increase the debt and increasing spending can reduce the debt. Most people simply won't accept this fact because they know absolutely nothing about basic macroeconomic ideas like fiscal multiplication and the marginal propensity to consume.

Another economic fairy story that is adored by the public is the idea that Labour blasts loads of money, and the Tories pay off the debts. George Osborne himself used this one back in 2007 when he said "As has been the case so many times before, it's the next Conservative government that will have to clean up the mess left by a profligate and irresponsible Labour Party". Millions of people believe that this is what has been going on, despite the fact that George Osborne has created more debt in just four years than every Labour government in history combined!

The mainstream media

The mainstream media has a lot to answer for giving George Osborne such an easy ride on his appalling track record of failure.

The right-wing press are notoriously biased towards the Tory party, meaning that he always gets an easy ride from them, no matter how often he has to revise his growth figures downwards and his borrowing figures upwards. However even traditionally left-wing publications like the Guardian are guilty of giving George Osborne a ridiculously easy ride too.

In this article entitled "George Osborne likely to miss deficit reduction target as UK borrowing rises" the Guardian discusses the fact that Obsorne looks set to miss his March 2014 projections by £10 billion, meaning that borrowing in 2014-15 will be £105 billion rather than the projected £95 billion. The fact that in 2010 George Osborne and the OBR projected that the budget deficit would be completely eliminated by 2015 wasn't even mentioned in the article.

Judging George Osborne by his most recent set of economic projections, rather than the promises he made when he became Chancellor in 2010 makes it look like he's going to be just 10% out on his calculations (borrowing £10 billion more than he claimed he would in March 2014), rather than 100% out (borrowing £105 billion more than he said he claimed he would in November 2010) . 

The habit of judging Osborne against his most recent set of economic predictions instead of what he promised when he came to power has allowed him to consistently revise his economic growth projections downwards and downwards and his borrowing projections upwards and upwards without anyone pointing out how spectacularly inaccurate his original projections have proven to be.

The Labour party

One of the main reasons that George Osborne gets away with such incompetence is the fact that the Labour party has completely given up trying to present anything resembling an alternative. From one day to the next the only thing the public hear from Ed Balls and the Labour party is that they plan to imitate George Osborne's economic policies.

Instead of pointing out that George Osborne has borrowed £207 billion more than he claimed he would in order to make the UK economy £128 billion smaller than he claimed it would be, Ed Balls has provided George Osborne with a veneer of false credibility by promising to stick to George Osborne's spending plans should Labour win in 2015!

Instead of repeatedly slamming George Osborne's pet quango the Office for Budget Responsibility for the fact their economic projections have proven to be so incredibly inaccurate over and over again, Ed Ball's has provided them with a veneer of false credibility by pledging to allow them to scrutinise his spending plans!

Instead of repeatedly attacking George Osborne's appalling track record of failure, the Labour party keep imitating George Osborne and providing him a veneer of legitimacy that he really doesn't deserve.

The public won't trust Labour on the economy because they appear to be imitating George Osborne with their aganda of austerity-lite. I mean why would anyone choose to believe in a watered-down imitation, rather than the thing that is being imitated?

The incredible stupidity of the Labour economic stance is one of the main reasons that the Labour party is lagging so far behind the Tories on economic credibility.

Conclusion

If we look at the unimaginably vast differences between what George Osborne promised his austerity agenda would achieve in 2010 and what has actually happened in reality, it is impossible to conclude that Osbornomics has been anything but a catastrophic failure.

In other articles I have explained why Osbornomics has failed, but in this one I've concentrated on how the public have come to believe that George Osborne and the Tories are economically trustworthy, despite the absolute mountain of evidence of their catastrophic economic mismanagement.

In my view there are many reasons including the widespread economic illiteracy of general the public (due to the appalling lack of economic literacy training in state schools), the incredibly biased reporting of the mainstream media and the absolutely ridiculous "austerity -lite" stance of the Labour party. 


 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 sources of income for  Another Angry Voice  are small donations from people who see some value in my work. If you appreciate my efforts and you could afford to make a donation, it would be massively appreciated.

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Scottish independence, a tale of hope against fear

In just a few days the people of Scotland will go to the polls to decide the future of their nation.

I'm not Scottish, I'm a Yorkshireman, and I don't live in Scotland. However I have written extensively about the Scottish independence referendum because I passionately believe that Scotland could be a better country if they had a smaller, more democratic and more accountable government, instead of being ruled over by the corrupt, self-serving and unaccountable Westminster establishment down in London.

A message of hope

The Yes campaign has attracted support from all kinds of people, from all different walks of life, and all different political persuasions. In my view the one thing that unifies them all is the idea that an independent Scotland has the potential to do things better. It's the hope of a working to create a better Scotland.

This hope for a better Scotland isn't just an idle optimistic fantasy because there is already plenty of evidence that a better Scotland can be achieved through the localisation of political power. Thanks to the existence of the Scottish parliament, access to university education in Scotland hasn't been commodified and financialised as it has been in the rest of the UK. Scottish students from poor and ordinary backgrounds aren't forced to assume huge debts, which are then repayed through a 9% aspiration tax on their disposable income, that for millions will not be payed off, even through an entire lifetime of work.

Thanks to the devolution of power over the NHS and the education system, Scotland has remained immune to the waves of Tory ideological privatisations that have seen £1.5 billion in NHS contracts handed out to Tory party donors, and over 3,000 English schools simply given away to unaccountable private sector interests.

The success of an independent Scotland is by no means guaranteed. If the Yes campaign wins the vote, the people of Scotland can't just sit back and relax at a job well done, It is absolutely vital that the amazing spirit of political engagement that has been awoken by the independence debate is kept alive.

In order for an independent Scotland to "do things better" the ordinary people of Scotland will have to engage in the process of constitutional renewal, work hard to hold their politicians to account, and work together to make sure that the issues that are important to them stay at the forefront of the political agenda.

A Yes vote isn't the objective in itself. The real objective is for the people of Scotland to give themselves the opportunity to hold the Scottish government to account, in a way that has been simply impossible to do through the corrupt and antiquated political system that has allowed the Westminster establishment to ruthlessly enforce their agenda of austerity and privatisation against the will of the vast majority of the population.

A message of fear

The No campaign has promoted a very different message, a message based around the basic animal instinct of fear. The Westminster establishment and their allies in the mainstream media have bombarded the public with one scare story after another.

The No campaign has constantly fearmongered about how Scottish oil is going to dry up, even though the experts are divided on how many billions of barrels remain untapped, and how many hundreds of billions of pounds that will be worth to the Scottish economy. The only consensus between the experts in the oil industry over how much oil remains seems to be that the figures publicised by George Osborne's Office for Budget Responsibility are extraordinary under-estimates.

The No campaign has fearmongered about Scotland not being able to defend itself. Who could forget the former Secretary of State for Scotland George Robertson (who now occupies a seat in the anti-democratic House of Lords) demeaning his own country by referring to it as "a minor entity in the north of Britain" as he tried to fearmonger about the threat of Islamist extremism to an independent Scotland. In my view the threat of Islamist extremism in Scotland would be severely diminished if future governments of the nation avoid participation in the invasion and occupation of predominantly Muslim countries.

The No campaign has fearmongered about the major banks relocating their headquarters to London, presumably because they assume that the Scottish public are such a bunch of feckless halfwits that they'll have completely forgotten that it was the banks that created the economic crisis in the first place with their massive fraud schemes and their incredible binge of reckless unregulated gambling. Even if some of the banks do relocate their headquarters, they can't just take all of their jobs and tax revenues with them. Taxes on financial services provided in an independent Scotland would go to the Scottish government*, no matter where the official headquarters of the bank that provides them. 

RBS, which is 82% owned by the taxpayer, threatening to leave an independent Scotland in order to try to influence the outcome of the referendum just goes to show the desperation of the Westminster establishment. What on earth is a publicly owned bank doing trying to interfere with a public vote? 

Even though the No campaign has been losing ground in the debate as the referendum has drawn nearer, they have stubbornly refused to change tack. And in the final week, ludicrous stories were circulated about how the supermarkets would impose massive price rises in an independent Scotland. Fortunately there was someone with the good sense to actually write to the supermarkets and ask them. The response from all four of the supermarket giants was the same; that they have no plans at all to raise prices in an independent Scotland.

It beggars belief that the leaders of Better Together can't see that their fearmongering has been driving undecided people into the arms of the Yes camp, and with just days to go before the vote they still haven't tried to present anything resembling a coherent positive case for continued union. All they seem capable of doing is pressurising their corporate buddies into talking down the prospects for an Independent Scotland in order to constantly snipe that "Scotland just won't be able to hack it on it's own". If I was a Unionist (which I'm not) I'd be utterly dismayed with the risible Better Together campaign and the hopelessly complacent debating strategies they've used.

Perhaps the biggest fearmongering campaign of all is the insistence by the Westminster establishment that Scotland will not be able to use the Pound, which is of course, as Alistair Darling himself admits, an impossible threat. Scotland can use the Pound because it is a freely tradeable currency. The only thing that the Westminster establishment can do in reality is to rule out a formal currency union between Scotland and the remainder of the UK.

In my view a long-term currency union wouldn't be in the interests of an independent Scotland anyway (look at the Argentina-US pegged currency union and the Eurozone), however a temporary fixed-term currency union in order to ensure economic stability during the process of constitutional separation would have been by far the most pragmatic option from an economic perspective, because economic uncertainty leads to economic instability (risk aversion, market panics and the development of economic crises).

Such a short term currency agreement would have mitigated some of the worst effects of economic uncertainly on either side of the border during the constitutional separation, however such a pragmatic stance was never going to be adopted by the Westminster establishment because uncertainty over the future currency of Scotland is one of the pillars of their anti-independence propaganda campaign. The fact that the Westminster establishment would put a political propaganda narrative above the stability of the economies on either side of the border just goes to show how terribly unfit to rule they really are.

Conclusion

I know it's not possible to imagine that all pro-Independence people are hopeful optimists, nor to tar all anti-independence people as cynical and fearful pessimists, because that would be the kind of naive absolutist thinking I so often argue against in my work. However, in my view it is fair to describe that the propaganda strategies employed by the two campaigns as a battle between hope and fear.

The spirit of hope must be stronger than fear, because what optimism can we have for the future if, even after the amazing political reawakening of Scotland, the majority still choose fear over hope? What optimism can we possibly have for the future if the positive, complex and very human spirit of hope can be defeated by the negative, simplistic and animalistic sensation of fear?

I'm hoping that later this week I'll be able to celebrate the rebirth of the Scottish nation, and drink heartily to the future of Scotland, rather than having to lament that the people of Scotland passed up the greatest opportunity of their lifetimes to effect real political change because they allowed the animal instinct of fear to overpower the human spirit of hope.

 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 sources of income for  Another Angry Voice  are small donations from people who see some value in my work. If you appreciate my efforts and you could afford to make a donation, it would be massively appreciated.

* As long as the Scottish people are prepared to pressurise the Scottish government into clamping down on tax-dodging.

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