Saturday 23 February 2013

Osborne Doing What He Knows Best

After Britain was stripped of its AAA-rated debt status for the first time ever Friday, predictably George Osborne has come in for a fair amount of stick and is being labelled inept and inexperienced but that isn't fair.
Rather than being a towel-folding nobody without any experience of running an economy, i refuse to believe that you gain this level of ability of being so utterly incompetent without years of experience.
So while we think of George bumbling his way from the Bullingdon Club to Conservative Central Office to the Chancellors Chair via a spell folding towels at Selfridges, it was a period of gaining experience of doing absolutely nothing therefore moulding him into the type of person who can get into office and make a complete shambles of the countries economy. 
Far from being inept and a economic dunce, he has put into practice exactly what he learned in those years, namely, f**k all.
To anyone else, the triple dip recession we are heading into and the downgrading of the AAA status to AAA1, would signal that it was time for Plan B, but to a man with George's experience of doing sweet FA, he has promised to not only plough on with what is patently already not working, but to 'stick to his course and redouble his resolve to tackle Britain's financial problems'.
You don't get to be that bad by accident, to have the country removed from the elite club of AAA countries, that is years of experience of sitting on his arse doing nothing worthwhile swinging into action.  
In 2010, in the run-up to the General Election, Gideon explained that he would 'safeguard Britain's credit rating with a credible plan to eliminate the bulk of the structural deficit over a parliament' which he plainly hasn't done and the country now faces even further hardship as the reduced credit rating makes it more expensive for the UK to borrow money but it hasn't happened because George is inexperienced, it has happened because George has put into practise exactly what he knows about running an economy, nothing whatsoever.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

really, that's the problem in the UK? everything can be tied to one factor. it may have felt good writing it. it is not very persuasive.

q

Lucy said...

When the economy tanks we shouldn't be blaming the man who is running the economy?

Anonymous said...

obama wasn't so i got confused...

q

Cheezy said...

That's because it 'tanked' before he got there.

Which is also why Osborne's been cut a lot of slack after he took the reins.

Two key differences though:
One is that there was still a very real danger of total financial meltdown (banks going under/ savings being lost/ 1930s style depression) when Obama took over in the US. In the UK, that particular danger was averted by Alastair Darling. And in fact, there were some distinct 'green shoots' when he took over, which there aren't now.

The other is that the economy is starting to improve in the US. Here, George keeps cutting and the debt keeps going up. It seems he simply doesn't understand how different macroeconomics is from micro. He's not the only one, but he's supposed to be the Chancellor.