Dear Sir,
George Osborne announced the new budget was for an ‘aspirational nation’. All we aspire to is an unbridled continuation of the rich getting richer, and the poor getting poorer.
By 2018, debt is set to double to over 1.3 trillion pounds; while workers bear the sting of real terms cuts in their wages for the next four years. The aspiration Osbourne talks about, is home ownership. Where people can afford to put down a 5% deposit on a new build house, the government will pay 20% of the mortgage.
This is an ideological budget aimed at the middle class. For Osborne, on the other side of the class divide, what he understands to mean poor, are people who have £10,000 in the bank to put down on a modest £200,000 home. Perhaps he thinks this is the answer to the council housing crises, in much the way Marie Antoinette is fabled to have thought that cake was an option for those who had no bread.
The Office for Budget Responsibility predicts the current budget will produce no growth in the economy. Even the most optimistic forecasts have slashed their figures in half, predicting that it’ll take until the end of 2016 to see the economy where it was on the eve of the Leeming Brothers collapse.
Meanwhile, 48 000 young people have joined the dole queue to bring the youth unemployment register back up to a million. The 22 billion in benefits cut from poorly paid hard working families will plunge children back into poverty which will cost 25 billion to loss adjust in other parts of the economy.
The chancellor will borrow 245bn more than expected, corporations sit on over 750bn. All the while, the banks refuse to lend to small businesses which would see universal job creation across the country. The international capitalist class have absorbed and hoarded all of our nation’s wealth.
Osborne’s answer is to give them more, as if it were like adding water to a glass until it eventually overflows and some of it trickles down the sides. The chancellor has thrown a scrap from the table to industry, a meager 3bn on infrastructure spending, but not until 2015!
Here in the North East, unemployment is up by 3000 to a total of 127 000. The new 10k income tax threshold looks like good news, but in context it is a damning indictment to say that in our region 140 000 people will be taken out of tax altogether. That’s 140 000 people working in part time jobs for poverty wages when what is necessary is massive investment in job creation in our region to offer people the hope of a future in a full time job on a living wage.
Then perhaps, we might find ourselves able to put down our five percent on a new build family home. Only, Osbourne knows that, if the carrot he dangles ever became within the reach of the poor, he wouldn’t have implemented the policy in the first place. The old principles of capitalism never change, free to those who can afford it, very expensive for those who can’t.
Warren Saunders
Newton Aycliffe
