Vote Balls Or Else
"For 13 years, Labour made many crap decisions on tax and spending: how to abolish boom and bust in 1997, how to fund extra NHS admin staff 2001, and last year how to pretend to reduce the deficit once the recovery was secured.
Each time we looked at whether it was right to raise VAT, and concluded it we didn't dare to do it. We reached that conclusion because VAT is the only tax that everyone has to pay, even if they are unemployed or pensioners, and because it hits couples with children the hardest. It is always the least popular option for raising tax. And we were cowards.
It is increasingly clear that David Cameron and George Osborne have no such qualms. Indeed, for more than two years, they have been preparing the ground to raise the standard rate of VAT.
The Tory preparations have reached a new stage with their letting the cat out of the bag that the public finances are in a completely shit state, even worse than they thought before the election.
When the Office of Budget Responsibility publishes the facts today, I don't suppose Alastair will get an apology, which is just fucking tough, the badger eyebrowed turncoat.
The Tory plan is clear: use inflated fears of a debt and monetary crisis to justify massive public spending cuts and an increase in VAT; blame it all on Labour’s mis-management of the economy; and use the resulting war chest to cut income tax before the next election.
It is Margaret Thatcher’s 1979 strategy spread out over a Parliament. We cannot expect the Liberal Democrats to talk the Tories out of this plan. After all, they are over the fucking moon about having ministers in a government for the first time in thousands of years.
I believe Labour must fight tooth and nail on behalf of me as the next leader of the party, not just after the forthcoming Budget – but now, when Millipede Senior can be stopped.
It would be economic madness to vote for anyone but me – on top of the spending cuts the Government has announced, anyone else will either depress spending and stifle growth, increase prices and stoke inflation, and be stabbed in the back by Charlie and Damien.
Such a leader would lose billions of pounds of backhanders from the union movement and put my own job at risk.
I was one of those who privately urged Gordon Brown to make our stance on VAT explicit in our manifesto. I believed that if we lied through our teeth and then raised VAT it would be no different to our other lies like the EUSSR referendum shit. But it would change the course of the election.
Others - such as the Badger! - disagreed – and ultimately we made no hard commitment on VAT. That was partly the traditional caution of governments, wanting to keep options open.
To my mind, to avoid telling that porkie was the biggest mistake we made at the election, even if the bastard money markets do applaud George Osborne for raising VAT.
I believe the time for Nu-Liebore is over unless they elect me as leader."
Ed Balls, the people's choice.
The Penguin
"Bless This House, Rice and Peas!"
