The pretence continues

A few days ago our Chancellor delivered his Spring Statement, presumably the equivalent in Treasury life of what used to be called the Budget, delivered with much pomp and circumstance. Shrouded, before delivery, in massive amounts of ego-enhancing secrecy. Now mostly seen through its media coverage, but this morning I thought I would go back to the horse's mouth, that is to say to reference 1. Which, to be fair, is there and is easy to find, even if there is rather a lot of it.

I start from a position that: our health and social care services need to be rebuilt after the ravages of the plague; we have spent a great deal of money on the plague, a lot of it borrowed; we need to spend more on defence in response to the threat from Russia; and, prices of imported energy and food are set to rise. All of which means that our standard of living otherwise is going to fall. All this stuff has to be paid for.

Against a background of a country which has been living beyond its means for years and where the distribution of wealth is pretty dire too.

So the Spring Statement contains an executive summary which, after fairly bland warnings about invasions and prices, moves onto all the great things our government has done and how it is going to cut taxes right, left and centre. How enterprise in the private sector is going to solve all our problems. How it is going to level us all up, that is to say the rich will get slightly richer and the poor will get slightly less poor.

But failing to point out that while transferring all kinds of services from the public sector to the private sector might make public finances look a bit better, it does nothing for our standard of living, with private sector services, particularly health and social care services, generally costing a lot more than their public sector equivalents. And what about the pig's ear our privatised gas companies have made of security of supply? Where are all the storage facilities and who owns them?

Then, straying slightly beyond the Executive Summary, I come across a more or less unintelligible economic summary at Table 1.1, reproduced above, a table which hides the parlous state of the country underneath all its talk of growth and change. Growth which it is high time we weaned ourselves off, along with weaning ourselves off our dependence on unsavoury and foreign rulers.

Depressed, of Epsom.

PS 1: note also the complications arising from sanctions against Russian businessmen illustrated at reference 2. Russian money has taken root, here and elsewhere, and rooting it out, if that is where we are headed, is going to be a messy and expensive business.

PS 2: on a slightly more cheerful note, I am reminded this morning that for those needing a top-up of their diet of Guardian, there is always JSTOR, part of the not-for-profit educational operation called ITHAKA. Lots of good stuff on their daily digest, to be found at reference 4. Presumably, as far as Trump and his followers are concerned, more or less a bunch of commies.

References

Reference 1: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/spring-statement-2022-documents.

Reference 2: Holland & Barrett struggles to pay interest on €415mn loan: Russian-linked owner LetterOne remains confident payment will be made despite processing issues - Robert Smith, Daniel Thomas, Stephen Morris, Financial Times - 2022.

Reference 3: https://www.jstor.org/. JSTOR for journal storage.

Reference 4: https://daily.jstor.org/. The daily digest.

Reference 5: https://www.ithaka.org/. Perhaps some link is intended to Odysseus and his homeland of Ithaca, but I have yet to see what it might be. Perhaps, rather, the link is to the city in upstate New York.