The budget not only shows the massive cost to ordinary people of saving fatcat bankers from the consequences of their multiple Ponzi schemes.
It also shows the total politicisation of the Civil Service under New Labour.
The Budget figures on borrowing, tax and spending going forward have been massaged to give the Chancellor political cover, by being based on impossible economic growth projections.
Nobody but nobody believes the Treasury forecast of 1.25% economic growth in 2010 and 3.5% in 2011. The IMF does not believe it and not one respected independent forecaster is so optimistic.
Vince Cable just described it as “Utter fantasy”. Vince Cable is quite correct.
But, as the BBC’s Nick Robinson just told us “Senior Treasury officials say that they stand by these projections.” That the senior civil servants in the Treasury have signed up to impossible projections, to give political support to the Chancellor, is a betrayal of all the values that are supposed to be represented by our Civil Service. What they have signed up to is not in the range of intellectually respectable opinion.
This is not difference of opinion. This is deliberate lying about the country’s economic prospects, by those entrusted with the stewardship of the economy.
Remember these are the same Treasury officials who just six months ago, also with political motivation, projected the fall in GDP this year as, at the top of the range, -1.25%. Just six months later they have radically revised that to -3.5% (which is still an underestimate of the collapse).
The situation is a disgrace, but not an accident. It is a reflection of the relentless politicisation of the senior ranks of the Civil Service under New Labour. Nowhere has that process been more thorough and ruthless than at the Treasury under Gordon Brown. There are now no senior civil servants, in key positions of influence for the budget, who are not New Labour apparatchiks.
Hence this politically motivated forecasting and its execrable quality.
After the next election and once these forecasts are shown for the specious ill-motivated propaganda that they are, every civil servant who signed up to these forecasts must be charged with gross misconduct, sacked, and stripped of their massive index-linked pension.
Not enough has been done to ensure that the bankers who fed fat on their Ponzi schemes cough back their ill-gotten gains after bringing disaster on us all. But the same must apply to the Civil Service too. The Augean stable Brown created must be swept clean of his bullshit so-called public servants.