Why is the Better Together campaign such a shambles?

In the last couple of weeks before the Scottish independence referendum I've covered the subject in some detail on my blog. Two of the core themes of my work have been the complacency of the Westminster establishment, and the astonishingly poor campaign strategy of the anti-independence camp.

In the article I wrote about the failings of the anti-independence campaign I identified four key areas of failure. The strategic error of ruling out Devo Max in order to play an "all or nothing" gamble with the constitutional future of the UK; the incessantly negative fearmongering tone of the No campaign; the risky and economically destabilising "you ain't keeping the pound" game of economic brinkmanship; and the unedifying spectacle of the three establishment party leaders making a haphazard dash to Scotland to make some undeliverable last minute promises.

There is plenty of detail and analysis in the original article, but for reasons of space I chose to leave out more detailed analysis of why I think Better Together has been such a strategic mess, which is the reason for this secondary article.

Let's get this absolutely clear before I go any further. Even if the swing to Yes is halted and reversed in the last week before the referendum, and the No campaign somehow manage to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, the anti-independence campaign has been completely inept. With the full weight of the political establishment and the corporate media behind them, the anti-independence campaign has still managed to lose control of the way the debate is being framed, and consequently they're losing the debate in the streets and in public meetings across Scotland.

Given the huge advantage of having the mainstream media on their side, the only way to explain the appalling failure of the No campaign is to look at the key personalities and decision makers. In my view the two most obvious politicians to blame for the strategically inept nature of the anti-independence campaign are Alistair Darling and George Osborne.

Alistair Darling

Other than the fact that he is an MP for a Scottish constituency, it's extremely difficult to think of any reason why Alistair Darling was selected as the leader of the anti-independence movement.

It's almost as if the political establishment imagine that the public are such a bunch of feckless halfwits that we'll simply have forgotten that he was the man who rescued the insolvent financial sector with £1.5 trillion in bailouts (over 100% of the GDP of the entire UK at the time) and demanded virtually nothing from the banks in return.

After years of New Labour turning a blind eye to the catastrophic decline of the UK manufacturing sector, Darling's bailouts for the insolvent banks were by far the biggest state subsidies in history.

What makes this grotesque example of "socialism for the rich" so much more offensive is that in his youth Darling was a Trotskyist and a member of the International Marxist Group. It doesn't matter if you're a left-wing or not, a guy who changes his stance from outright communism, to one of blatantly serving the interests of the capitalist financier class at the expense of the public, is clearly not a man to be trusted at all.

George Osborne
      
George Osborne may not be at the forefront of the anti-independence campaign, but his fingerprints are clearly all over it. The most notable influence he's had is the economically risky game of "you ain't getting the pound" brinkmanship.

Most well informed people know that George Osborne hasn't had a proper job in his entire life other than short stints at data entry and towel folding, and that he has no economics qualifications at all either. What a lot of people don't know is that aside from being the Chancellor of the Exchequer, he is also the chief strategist at Tory party HQ. Osborne has been deeply involved with Conservative Central Office since his decision to become a career politician in 1994. It's worth noting that since Osborne has been involved in Tory party strategic planning, the party has endured its longest run in history without achieving a majority government.

Since the Liberal Democrats helped the Tories sneak into power in 2010 George Osborne has been working tirelessly to extract the costs of Alistair Darling's bankers' bailouts from the poor and ordinary in the UK, causing a huge drop in public spending power, and the flatlining of the UK economy. Osborne's ideological austerity experiment is conclusive evidence that the man is oblivious to, unable to understand, or willfully ignorant of basic macroeconomic theory.

The flatlining of the UK economy that Osborne's ideological austerity experiment has caused, has resulted in him borrowing an incredible £200 billion more than he claimed he would back in 2010. In fact, Osborne has created so much extra debt during his four years as chancellor, that he's added more to the national debt than every Labour government in history combined!

Given that Osborne is so evidently clueless about macroeconomics, it's no surprise at all that he seems to have another blank spot when it comes to uncertainly, which is a hugely important factor in economics.

Nobody with the slightest understanding of how important economic uncertainty is, would ever consider deliberately seeding the Scottish electorate with fear over the future of their currency with "hard man" threats like "No ifs, no buts, we will not share the pound if Scotland separates from the UK" as George Osborne has been doing.

The problem with uncertainty is that it doesn't just affect Scotland when ridiculous threats like this are made, it destabilises the whole United Kingdom economy because economics doesn't exist in a vacuum. If you introduce uncertainty about the future value of the pound, you're clearly going to destabilise markets either side of the border.

In order to minimise the effects of economic uncertainty, the two sides should have sat down together and negotiated a short-term currency union during the process of constitutional separation in the event of a Yes vote. This would have been for the best of both economies, but George Osborne and the anti-independence crew clearly give much higher priority to making threats in order to intimidate the Scottish electorate, than they do to minimalising economic uncertainty, and avoiding the worst of its economically destabilising side effects.

No plan B

With inept clowns like Alistair Darling and George Osborne behind the anti-independence strategy, it's no wonder that it's so absolutely hopeless. Neither is it surprising that despite the extraordinary bias of the mainstream media, the Yes campaign are winning the debate on the ground.

One of the biggest indicators of the strategic ineptness of the anti-independence movement is the fact that David Cameron's official spokesperson has openly admitted that the government has made absolutely no contingency plans in case the Scottish electorate choose independence because "The government’s entire focus is on making the case for the UK staying together".

That the government has absolutely no plans should Scotland choose independence other than "they ain't sharing the Pound, no matter how much economic damage it causes either side of the border" reveals their endless repetitions of the claim that "Salmond has no plan B" as the nonsensical and profoundly ironic nonsense that it is.

If these people had any strategic nous at all, they wouldn't be automatically assuming that they're going to win, they'd have a contingency plan that amounted to more than "hard man" threats over the future of the Pound, and they certainly wouldn't be using "No plan B" as a favoured propaganda narrative, when it's absolutely clear that they themselves are the ones without anything remotely resembling a contingency plan.

Conclusion

Alistair Darling and George Osborne are clearly two of the most inept Chancellors in history. One was responsible for the biggest display of "socialism for the rich" in economic history despite having once been a Marxist, and the other has created more debt in four years than every Labour government in history combined, and clearly hasn't the faintest clue about important economic stuff like uncertainty and elementary macroeconomics.

With strategic incompetents like this arguing the case for union, it's absolutely no surprise at all that despite all of their advantages, they've run an appalling campaign driving countless moderates and undecideds into the arms of the Yes campaign.

 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 revenue 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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ANOTHER ANGRY VOICE    
    
How the Better Together campaign is failing
       
Margaret Thatcher's toxic neoliberal legacies
  
The "New Labour are left-wing" myth

A letter to Scottish voters
     
Scottish independence and the "heavy price" of voting no

     What do Tory donors get for their money?

Who is to blame for the 2008 financial sector insolvency crisis?

An entirely "Osbornomic" recession
      
Scottish independence and the complacency of the Westminster establishment

How Labour dropped the ball on Scottish independence
             

Political Myth Busting: The "always cleaning up Labour's messes" narrative

The myth that the Labour party are profligate with public money, and that the Tories go around cleaning up their messes is one of the most pervasive political narratives in the UK. It is thanks to this myth that even after four years of breathtaking economic incompetence from George Osborne, the Tories are still considered more trustworthy on economic issues than Labour by the majority of the public.

Regular readers will know that I am no fan of the New Labour party, however I'm completely sick of listening to delusional Tory tribalists mindlessly churning out their counter-factual "always cleaning up Labour's messes" narratives in order to defend George Osborne's record of economic incompetence, exactly as they have been programmed to do by the mainstream media.

It's not just delusional Tory supporters who repeat this myth either, even high profile Tories love to churn out counter-factual rubbish and outright lies.

Here's an example of George Osborne spreading this narrative from November 2008, before he came to power and proved himself the most incompetent man to serve as Chancellor of the Exchequer in almost 200 years (some feat considering his recent predecessors include Gordon "PFI" Brown and Norman "Black Wednesday" Lamont):

"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. We will have to establish a credible framework for bringing the public finances under control. That means creating a target of a balanced current budget and falling debt at the end of the forecast period, policed by a powerful and independent Office for Budget Responsibility." [source]

In this article I'll first provide evidence to fatally undermine the Tory narrative that they are the party of economic competence in the opening sentence of this quote, before then critiquing the rest of the quote in order to demonstrate George Osborne's appalling economic incompetence.

A quick look at the actual evidence reveals that only two Labour governments have ever left office leaving the national debt higher than it was when they came to power, all of the others have lowered the national debt as a percentage of GDP.

On the two occasions that Labour oversaw increases in the national debt there were the mitigating circumstances of huge global financial crises. The Ramsay MacDonald government of 1929-31 coincided with the Wall Street Crash (they left a 12% increase in the debt to GDP ratio), and the Blair-Brown government of 1997-2010 coincided with the 2008 financial sector insolvency crisis (an 11% increase). The other Labour governments all reduced the scale of the national debt, Clement Attlee's 1945-51 government reduced the national debt by 40% of GDP despite having to rebuild the UK economy from the ruins of the Second World War. Harold Wilson's 1964-70 government reduced the national debt by 27% of GDP and even the Wilson-Callaghan government of 1974-79 managed to reduce the debt by 4% of GDP.

The majority of Labour governments have ended up reducing the national debt, and the two that didn't coincided with the biggest global financial crisis of the 20th Century and the biggest global financial crisis so far in the 21st Century.

In order to put this "cleaning up Labour's mess" narrative to the test, it is useful to look at George Osborne's own record as Chancellor of the Exchequer. In his first 3 years as Chancellor George Osborne managed to add more to the national debt than the supposedly "profligate and irresponsible" Labour party did in the 13 preceding years. In fact, in just 4 years George Osborne has increased the national debt in real terms more than every Labour party chancellor in history combined!

By George Osborne's own estimates, the national debt will have grown by 26% of GDP between 2010 and 2015. In the last 200 years of economic history there have only been three periods of debt accumulation worse than George Osborne's tenure as Chancellor of the Exchequer: The First World War (+110% of GDP), the Second World War (+100% of GDP) and the tenure of Tory Chancellor Nicholas Vansittart 1812-1823 (+64% of GDP).

Not only has George Osborne added more to the national debt than any Labour government in history, he has also spectacularly missed all of his headline economic predictions. By the time the current parliament ends in 2015 Osborne will have borrowed £207 billion more than he claimed he was going to in 2010 in order to make the UK economy £128 billion smaller than he said it was going to be. He has also had the UK stripped of their AAA rating by the Credit Rating Agencies for the first time since the 1970s and overseen the longest sustained decline in wages in economic history.

Returning to George Osborne's 2008 quote we can see just how much of a failure he has been in his own terms. "We will have to establish a credible framework for bringing the public finances under control. That means creating a target of a balanced current budget and falling debt at the end of the forecast period". the Tories now admit that George Osborne's promises of a balanced budget and falling debt by the end of the 2010-2015 parliament are now impossible pipe dreams.

As for his supposedly "independent" Office for Budget Responsibility, George Osborne's pet economics quango have provided spectacularly inaccurate economic forecasts over and again. They willingly rubber stamped all of George Osborne's ludicrously over-optimistic projections based on his economic fairy stories about how the economy could be saved by drastically cutting expenditure across the board, without bothering to even evaluate the projected returns on investment on the infrastructure projects and services to be culled. One of the first steps for the the new government in 2015 should be to abolish the OBR, or at least rename it more accurately as the Office for Budget Recklessness.

The remarkable thing is that despite George Osborne's abysmal track record of failure, Tory tribalists still wheel out the "always cleaning up Labour's mess" narrative as if increasing the national debt by 11% of GDP in 13 years (as New Labour did) is somehow significantly worse than George Osborne's record of increasing the national debt by 26% in just 5 years.

What is even worse is that the mindless Tory tribalists now have another grotesquely counter-factual narrative about "the economic recovery" to blether on about. They seem intent on talking up the fact that the UK has now recovered to the pre-crisis economic peak, despite the fact that the UK was the last major western economy to do so, and that this so called recovery shows that the UK economy has grown by an aggregate 0% over the last seven years!

The reality is that the GDP of the UK is now pretty much exactly the same as it was just before the economic crisis, however the economy has been massively rebalanced, with a huge increase in the share of the wealth in the hands of the top 0.5%, and a large reduction in the living standards of the majority due to wage repression, severe cuts in in-work benefits, rampant inflation in the costs of transport, fuel, housing and food, and George Osborne's hike in VAT.

The majority of us are significantly worse off after four years of ideological "Osbornomics", the national debt is much higher than Osborne claimed it would be, and the economy is much smaller than he projected it would be. The sad thing is that there will be just as many delusional Tory tribalists hawking their absurd "economic recovery" narratives they've rote learned from the mainstream media as there are credulous Tory supporters invoking the ludicrous "always cleaning up Labour's mess" fairy stories.

The Tory "cleaning up Labour's mess" narrative just doesn't stand up to the evidence, however, when it comes to Tory politics, facts and evidence are much less important than the creation of simplistic narratives to feed to a dumbed-down and credulous public. It doesn't matter what the evidence says, because the typical political tribalist isn't remotely interested in searching out the evidence and fact-checking things. All they require is a nice simplistic narrative that confirms their prejudices, and allows them to go around thinking that they are an expert due to their complete understanding of their simplistic explanation, despite the fact that they know next to nothing about the much more complex reality.

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The Great Neoliberal Lie

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Poverty in 21st Century Britain - A Tory comedy

On the 18th of December 2013 the Tory party showed their true colours in a debate on food poverty.

The Tory bench chatted noisily and giggled their way through the entire debate, for which they were reprimanded by the deputy speaker on several occasions. Had they been listening to the introductory speech by the Labour shadow DEFRA minister Maria Eagle instead of chattering away noisily they would have heard the following:

• The number of people visiting foodbanks has risen from 40,000 to 500,000 since the Tories came to power in 2010.
• 19% of food bank referrals have been as a result of the Government’s changes to welfare payments and more than a third are caused by delays in payments to people who are legitimately entitled and nearly a fifth of people referred to food banks actually have jobs.
• An official report on the growth in food banks was completed in June 2013 but the government is still refusing to make it public six months later.
• Since 2010 the UK has suffered the longest period of falling real wage values since records began. The Tory policy of wage repression has resulted in wages rising by less than the rate of inflation for 41 out of the last 42 months.
• The cost of staple foods (fruit, vegetables, meat, bread & cereals) have risen way above the rate of inflation and poor families are spending significantly more of their limited incomes on food.
• The costs of energy and water are rising way above the rate of inflation whilst the profits of the privatised energy and water companies are soaring.
• The cost of nursery places is rising five times faster than pay, there are 35,000 fewer child care places and 576 fewer Sure Start centres.

The minister responsible for welfare Iain Duncan Smith decided not to even bother with the debate, he stuck around for a while to have a good laugh before sneaking out early (perhaps to change his trousers after pissing himself laughing at all the rib ticking tales of poverty and suffering?). The person the Tories put forward instead was the appalling Esther McVey. Her response to this barrage of facts and evidence was to launch yet another feeble and downright dishonest "blame Labour" narrative - here's her risible riposte.

"I welcome this debate to answer honestly the points made in the motion and to clarify all this, but to be honest, a far more realistic debate would have been brought by Government Members and the people of the United Kingdom on how Labour derailed the UK, destroyed its finances"

The first and most obvious point to make is that McVey cites her own honesty twice in a single sentence. The people most likely to talk up their own honesty like this are those that are about to say something dishonest, and McVey did precisely that with the outright lie that the UK had the largest structural deficit in the developed world under Labour. 

In monetary terms the 4.8% of GDP budget deficit run by the USA in 2009 was many times the size of the UK deficit by virtue of the fact that the US economy is many times larger than the UK economy. The statement remains untrue if we consider the data in percentage terms too because in 2009 Greece had a structural deficit almost double the size of the UK (9.8% of GDP). Even if we allow the artificial exclusion of Greece as a developed country, the narrative that the UK finances were in a significantly worse state than other developed nations in 2009-10 is blown out of the water by the spectacular implosion of the Irish economy, which led to an incredible budget deficit of 30.6% GDP in 2011 (which puts the 5.5% of GDP deficit that McVey was blatantly fearmongering about into perspective). Perhaps the fact that Japan had a debt to GDP ratio of 174% in 2010 when the national debt under Labour was 44% of GDP might also put McVey's desperate debt fearmongering into perspective.

It is absolutely clear that the real cause of the global financial sector crisis was the reckless risk taking of financial sector institutions such as Lehman Brothers, AIG, RBS, Northern Rock, Bradford and Bingley etc, not solely the maladministration of the Labour government in the UK. Labour can be apportioned some of the blame for their light touch regulation of the City of London and their refusal to deflate the UK property bubble, however at the time the Tories were squealing for even more financial sector deregulation which would undoubtedly have made the financial sector crisis even worse. George Osborne's refusal to re-regulate the City of London and the existence of his barmy multi-billion Help to Buy (Help the Banks) property price inflation subsidies suggest that the Tories haven't even got the most rudimentary understanding of what actually caused the financial crisis.

McVey continued with her strategy of citing her own honesty (she did this four times) as a pathetic attempt to disguise the lies that she was telling. Here's another corking lie:
 
"We are paying back all the debt that we saw under Labour"

The truth is that the Tories have borrowed more in three years that Labour borrowed in their 13 years in office. Since 2010 the UK national debt has risen from 44% of GDP to 76% of GDP. Only a Tory could claim that borrowing an extra £400 billion in just three years represents a "paying back" of debt.

All of this dishonest economic bluster hid the fact that McVey had very little to say about any of the actual points raised by Maria Eagle other than a ludicrous claim that the rise in food bank dependency is a good thing because "“It is positive that people are reaching out to support other people". In fact her refusal to actually engage with the evidence revealed that she saw the debate on food poverty as nothing more than an excuse to suck up to the Tory party leadership by trotting out the same old propaganda narratives the Tories have been leaning on to disguise their own criminal mismanagement of the economy for the last three years.

What is even more sickening that McVey's desperate and feeble efforts to blame Labour for a cost of living crisis that has spiraled out of control since 2010 were the howls of laughter from the government benches at the plight of the poorest and most vulnerable people in the UK. The Labour MP for Copeland Jamie Reed summed up this sickening Tory gloating by saying "I regret to say that the laughter from some of those on the Government Benches during this debate says more than words ever could".
 
After making her appalling speech McVey didn't even bother to listen to the rest of the debate. The Labour MP for Manchester, Gorton Gerald Kaufman said "It is disgraceful that the junior Minister, having made one of the nastiest Front-Bench speeches I have heard in my 43 years in this House, has now sloped off and not bothered to listen to the views of the House".

In the end the motion to make combating food poverty a government priority was defeated by the Tories and their Lib Dem sidekicks. Amongst the votes to defeat the motion were those of Iain Duncan Smith and Esther McVey, both of whom ignored the actual debate and then wandered back into the chamber to vote down the motion they couldn't even be bothered to debate. I believe that it is about time that new rules are established that any MP that has not witnessed at least 80% of the parliamentary debate is excluded from voting on the issue. If they can't even be bothered to listen to the debate, they should lose their right to vote on it.
      

 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.

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 ANOTHER ANGRY VOICE 

   
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George Osborne's economic blunders

There has been a lot of debate over George Osborne's ideological austerity experiment. Some people claim that he is economically illiterate and incompetent, hence the appalling failure of his economic plans (after over three years of "Osbornomics" the UK economy is still smaller than it was before the global financial crisis hit).

Others have pointed to evidence that the rich are getting wealthier at a faster rate than ever, whilst the poor and ordinary are bearing the full burden of "austerity" (through cuts and wage repression) as evidence that Osborne isn't as incompetent as he looks, and that if his plans are viewed as a deliberate strategy to redistribute wealth from the majority to the tiny super-rich establishment minority, then his plans are succeeding quite spectacularly well.

I'll leave it up to you to decide which interpretation is closest to the truth, however there are some things that can't be disputed. One of which is the fact that George Osborne has utterly failed to meet the economic predictions he made in 2010 (back when the UK still had AAA Credit Ratings).

Osborne's most hubristic prediction was that his plan would eliminate the budget deficit over the course of a single parliament. He claimed that the government would need to borrow £322 billion between 2010 and 2015, and that after that, the government would be able to run a surplus and begin paying back the debt.

In March 2013 the borrowing figure for the 2010-2015 period was revised upwards to £564 billion, and George Osborne's pet quango the Office For Budget Responsibility Recklessness were admitting that the budget deficit couldn't be eliminated until well into the next parliament. That's a £242 billion accounting error!
 
The government's own financial watchdog have admitted that George Osborne's 2010 financial predictions were out by a whopping 75%. I have explained in another blog post how these vast budgetary miscalculations came about so I won't clutter up this article with a lengthy explanation of faulty fiscal multiplication assumptions (if you're interested, the article is here).

Given that his 2010 financial predictions were so extraordinarily inaccurate, we've got to wonder how on earth he's still in his job. I mean, if he was employed by a private sector organisation (which, apart from a brief stint as a towel floder, he never has been), there is absolutely no way such huge errors would be tolerated, he'd be out on his ear and rightly so.

What is it that is keeping him in his job?

In my view it is a combination of factors, which include the following:

The rich are getting richer: The people that pull the strings don't actually have a problem with the soaring national debt or the impoverishment of the masses, as long as they're still getting richer, they'll pat Gideon Osborne on the head and tell him what a remarkably good job he's doing.

Tory Tribalism: The Tories are not a political party, they are a tribe. It doesn't seem to matter how inept, dishonest or unpopular any member of their tribe becomes, they will support them. If the odious and incompetent Iain Duncan Smith can hang onto his job at the DWP (despite his appalling track record of failure), it is hardly surprising that a bloke that made a £242 billion accounting error is allowed to keep his job as Chancellor.

Inherited privilege: They say that "scum always floats to the top" and nowhere is this more true than the British establishment. The British establishment, and especially Westminster politics are absolutely riddled with air-headed toffs that only made it to the top through inherited privilege. Meritocricy is an alien word to these people, and they have worked tirelessly to undo the social progress of the post-war mixed economy. Nowhere is this inherited entitlement culture more obvious than the Tory party, which is riddled with millionaires from establishment families.

Media complicity: The corporate media is almost completely dominated by right-wing apologists that are disinclined to criticise one of their own, and the BBC is simply a mouthpiece of the establishment. Whichever party is in power are their paymasters, so they've always toed the line, but since they were castrated over the "sexed up" Iraq dossier, they've been even more compliant than before. The lack of mainstream media criticism of George Osborne's catastrophic economic miscalculations is a clear demonstration that the majority of them support his agenda, despite the fact that it has already added more to the national debt in just 3 years than Neo-Labour added during their 13 years in office.

Lack of alternatives: If Winston Churchill were alive today he'd be absolutely appalled at the intellectual paucity of the Tory party. It has gone from a party that produced great statesmen and orators like Benjamin Disraeli and Winston Churchill, to a party of self-serving careerists with an unhealthy obsession with a particularly egregious bunch of pseudo-scientific theories known variously as "Thatcherism", "Neoliberalism" or "Neoclassical Economics", where talentless nobodies like David Cameron and George Osborne have effortlessly risen to the top of the party. The modern Conservative party (aside from one or two very rare exceptions) has become a moral and intellectual vacuum. An echo-chamber for absurd "greed-is-a-virtue" pseudo economics, stuffed full of members of the inherited wealth entitlement classes. There's virtually nobody in the Tory party that is actually capable of doing anything differently.

Even if it wasn't then, It is absolutely clear now, how much of an absurdly over-optimistic fantasy George Osborne's 2010 economic forecasts were. 

It is also clear that his Office for Budgetary Responsibility Recklessness is just a rubber stamping organisation, designed to use neoliberal economic dogma to add a veneer of economic legitimacy to barkingly mad economic plans. Their failure to spot the £242 billion hole in George Osborne's figures was bad enough, but their insultingly feeble post hoc excuses are perhaps even worse. 

This £242 billion miscalculation also demonstrates how gullible Osborne's fellow Tories, the right-wing press and the UK business lobby were to lap up his extraordinarily over-optimistic financial predictions back in 2010. They wanted desperately to believe that a good bout of neoliberal dogma would sort everything out, but instead it crushed the life out of the economic recovery that had started in 2009, gave us three long years of economic stagnation, and as a consequence, millions of working people have seen their wages eroded away by inflation month after month after month to pay for Gideon Osborne's reckless economic experiment.

 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 

               
An entirely "Osbornomic" recession 
      
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Do the Royals make us richer?

 After posting an image relating to the royal birth on the Another Angry Voice Facebook page I was inundated with countless iterations of the same basic claim; that the Royal family bring in more money to the economy than the £38 million in annual subsidies the Queen receives from the taxpayer.

One of these royal sycophants laughably attempted to substantiate their claim with an absurdly pro-monarchist clip on Youtube, in which a £160 million a year "net benefit" to the UK economy was claimed. That's the figure I'm going to consider in this article.

Before I get around to discrediting this £160 million figure as the nonsense that it is, lets first assume for a while that it is true. £160 million may sound like a lot of cash, but in perspective it's a piddlingly small amount given the enormous assets at royal disposal and the size of the UK economy. To put this alleged "net contribution" into context:

• £160 million is just 1.2% of the Queen's estimated net worth.
• £160 million is just 0.01% of UK GDP (which was £1.54 trillion in 2012)
• £160 million is just 0.02% of UK government expenditure in 2012 (£682 billion)
• £160 million is just 0.007% of the total UK national debt (which stands at £2.33 trillion if financial sector bailouts are included, as they should be).

The Queen is by far the biggest landowner in the world with 6.6 billion acres to her name (the next biggest landowner in the world is King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia with 830 million acres, just 12% of the Queen's land portfolio). In the UK, the Crown Estates' 384,000 acre landholding is estimated to be worth at least £8-10 billion, whilst the Duchy of Cornwall (another separate estate which has been run since 1377 for the benefit of the heir to the throne) consists of 133,000 acres, now worth an estimated £1.5 billion. Aside from the Royal property portfolios, vast swathes of the UK are still owned by the descendants of the aristocratic classes that were gifted huge tracts of stolen land by the royal family over the centuries (but that's another story).

If all the royal estates are added together this gives the royal family the third biggest land holding in the entire country after the Forestry Commission and the Ministry of Defence. This property portfolio includes some of the most potentially valuable buildings in the entire country and even half of the UK coastal seabed (which comes in quite handy if the government decides to pay you heaps of cash to build a load of offshore windfarms there).

Does it not seem a little odd that the royalist crowd are trying to cheer a piddling net contribution of just 1/5,000th of current UK government expenditure, from what is undoubtedly the largest private landholding in the country? Is it not even remotely possible that the Crown Estate, the Duchy of Cornwall and the various other property assets in the royal portfolio could be put to much more efficient economic usage than they are currently? 

Another factor worthy of consideration before I get around to discrediting the claimed £160 million "net benefit" is that the only people who could possibly be convinced that a contribution of just 0.02% of government expenditure represents a good deal, are those that are fervorent supporters of the institution of monarchy. Other people that are capable of putting this supposed contribution into context and considering whether the maintenance of such anachronistic inequality have social costs that outweigh the claimed financial benefits, are less likely to consider this a good deal. Put simply, people that cite this kind of fabricated evidence are the kind of people that know the price of everything and the value of nothing. 

In order to generate their £160 million figure, the royal apologist likes to add income generated from tourism into the mix, however they carefully exclude the possibility that tourism revenues could actually be massively increased by opening up the royal palaces to tourism (making one of them the most uber-exclusive hotel in the entire world perhaps). The Palace of Versailles is the single most lucrative tourist attraction in France, it's hard to imagine that it would generate quite as much revenue if it were still a private monarchical residence.

Imagine if the Crown Estate were privatised; carved up and sold off to the private sector like so many of our (actually quite useful) public assets have been over the last three decades.

How much do you think might be raised through the sale of over half a million acres of land, all those castles and palaces, and all that treasure? If just 1% of it per year were privatised, that would raise far more than this imaginary net contribution of £160 million.

Another factor that the royal apologist neglects to include in their calculations is that the royal estates are not subject to inheritance tax (like the assets of most wealthy people are). Surely the vast amounts of inheritance tax that the royal family will avoid when the Queen dies should be subtracted from the pie-in-the-sky £160 million figure? The net worth of the Queen is estimated to be £13 billion, so the £5.2 billion in inheritance tax bill they will avoid (around £87 million a year for every single year of her reign to date) should surely be subtracted from this supposed royal "net contribution".

Another factor to consider is the secretive powers the royal family have to manipulate government legislation to their own advantage. The Guardian tried for years to reveal the truth about these anti-democratic interventions but their Freedom of Information requests into what kind of insidious influence the royal family have had over parliamentary legislation were quashed by the Tory Attorney General Dominic Grieve using a rarely used power of veto and the absurd justification that the contents must remain secret because they could ruin the public perception of Prince Charles' political neutrality and "seriously damage his future role as king"! So according to Tory party logic, the public mustn't be allowed to know how the royal family have undermined democracy to further their own interests, because if they did know, they would be so outraged by the revelations that the royal family might fall as a consequence!

One must wonder what a secretive veto over parliamentary legislation could be worth in financial terms. It is clearly impossible to subtract the financial benefit of a secretive legislative veto from the supposed "net benefit" the royals provide, since the government won't even disclose what laws have been tampered with, let alone in what ways. If it is impossible to know exactly how the royals have benefited from such anti-democratic meddling, it's also impossible to estimate how much financial harm may have been inflicted on the wider UK economy simply in order to appease royal whims.

In January 2011, shortly after the ridiculous decision to veto disclosure of these anti-democratic royal interventions on the most spurious of grounds, the Tory party introduced new legislation to exempt the royal family and their staff from the Freedom of Information Act entirely. Even if disclosure would clearly be in the public interest, the Tories have now hidden the royal finances and their political interferences behind an impenetrable veil of secrecy. Here's what the former member of the Public Accounts Committee Ian Davidson said:

"I'm astonished that the Tory led Government should find time to seek to cover up royal finances. When I was on the PAC, what we wanted was more disclosure not less ... Every time we examined royal finances we found extravagance and indulgence as well as abuse of expenses by junior royals ... Everywhere we looked, there were savings to be made for the Government. This sends the wrong message about public disclosure and accountability."

One must wonder why such a conspicuous veil of secrecy over the royal finances is necessary. If the royal family really are the "net contributors" that royal sycophants endlessly claim that they are, then surely they should be proud to demonstrate their "net contribution" in an accountable manner, rather than deliberately hiding it from public scrutiny.

Given the exemption from inheritance tax, the extremely dubious "increased tourism" claims, the secretive powers to influence parliamentary legislation and the cloak of official secrecy over the royal finances, I believe the only people who would actually be taken in by the fantastical £160 million "net benefit" figure would be intellectually lazy ideological royalists in search of some big looking numbers to feed into their personal confirmation biases.

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