Hartlepool is near Durham. I’ve never been there, and I’m sure it is a delightful epicentre of proper socialist thinking and cultural awareness. Sadly, they have an idiot for an MP, who in a rare moment of nominative determinism goes by the name of Brash. Mr Brash has an X account (of course he does, how else can he spread the good news! Ed.)- and he has just deleted the following, which I assume was written sober and with all his faculties available:
“Public sector workers use their income to pay FOR the private sector. The state is one of the biggest procurers of the private sector. It wouldn’t exist without taxpayers. People creating the divide between public and private genuinely don’t understand how an economy works.”
In theory, you get the government you deserve, but the people of Hartlepool cannot be so unaware of life’s realities. Can they? The rest of the Brash Twitter account, which he has not had the good sense to take down, equally reveals the real economic maelstrom that people like him, who are economically illiterate, will ensure overwhelms the nation.
One of his bosses in HMG would be the chancellor, and he made one of those Nothing-To -See-Here statements to reassure us all that safe hands were on the tiller.
“Fiscal discipline is the bedrock of our UK economic stability and national security, which is why we are committed to meeting our fiscal rules, with a buffer against global uncertainties. We are cutting the deficit faster than any other G7 economy, while giving people a bit of breathing space with cost of living pressures and focusing support to get young people into work.”
The reason Healey felt the need to issue this platidunous tosh was that the ONS announced that Blighty has hit (as near as damnit) £3tn of debt! Simultaneously, we also learned that borrowing was higher than OBR forecasts at £1.8bn in July, up £0.7bn year on year. The manifesto promise that income tax would not go up only apparently applied to Brash Twitter readers, because Self-assessed income tax was collected last month and total receipts reached £17.1 billion, £1.7 billion higher than last year.
Coupled with inflation hitting 2.9% and heading North in every sense, one of the increasing burdens for households is the entire sorry saga of energy and net zero.
The Environmentalists believe that by destroying the UK economy, it’s industrial base, and it’s infrastructure, we will decrease our current 0.72% contribution to global warming (measured by CO2 equivalence), which, in turn, will convince others to follow suit and to destroy their own economies, rather than the actuality of them all just laughing at us, and continuing to lead warm, productive lives.
To put that 0.72% figure into context, if we stopped all CO2 production immediately, we would be directly responsible for lowering global warming by one ten-thousandth of a degree Celsius per annum. HOWEVER, and to be totally candid, we import so much stuff made abroad that our consumption footprint is 65% bigger than our emissions. So if we lived in caves and never cooked again, we could lower the globe’s heating problems by 0.6%.
HUZZAH!
No, no… wait.
