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Osbonomics

Glen Newey

A new five-year plan is always a landmark event in the life of the people. The chancellor has acknowledged the deviationist errors of the past. He has re-educated himself since the 2012 budget which tried to VAT meat pies, a staple of the worker’s diet. He has learned how to do glottal stops so he can tell the people how it is in a language they understand. He is the economy’s friend. He knows that a friend to the economy is a friend to the worker, the powerhouse of the land.

Reactionary elements pretend that the people’s interest is served by unregulated markets. Meanwhile deviationist leftist ‘radical’ cadres would pretend otherwise. Cheerled by the Daily Mail, they would have people believe that the budget changes will leave ‘thirteen million families £260 worse off’ because of a ‘“take from the poor” raid on welfare’, which ‘took ‘much more from poorer households than richer ones’. The rag is quoting renegade deviationist colporteurs from the Institute for Fiscal Studies, which says that three million families will lose £1000 a year. According to the institute’s propaganda, cobbled together after the budget, £12 billion in welfare spending will be cut by 2019-20. Of this, half comes from cuts to tax credits, ostensibly brought in to help working families, but in reality a gift to the wage-skimping running dogs of capitalism. Our chancellor is giving those dogs a well-earned ‘kick’ by cutting real-terms benefits for working-age ‘benefit’ claimants by 8 per cent between 2012 and 2019.

In accordance with the new five-year plan, the people’s economy will sustain yearly 2.5 per cent growth and a permanent budget surplus. Public sector deficit will be outlawed and consigned to pulped editions of the encyclopedia. In his address to the congress of people’s deputies the chancellor was able to announce that from next spring the old bourgeois-reformist ‘minimum’ wage will fade into the background. There will be a compulsory ‘living wage’ of £7.20 an hour for all workers (over the age of 25), to which the work and pensions secretary reacted with a spontaneous, rhapsodic outburst to convey the gratitude of the people. Younger workers will continue to enjoy the fruits of social solidarity by earning a minimum but not a living wage. They will receive £5.30 (if aged between 18 and 20) or £6.70 (if 21 to 25) per hour under the minimum wage from 1 October; apprentices will get a very generous 19 per cent increase to no less than £3.30. The rate for 16 and 17-year-olds will soar by a full 8 pence to £3.87 per hour. This is truly a pioneering moment in the life of the working masses.

At the same time revolutionary momentum will be sustained by relieving workers in £1 million houses of the burden of inheritance tax.

It is noted that the member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip lately championed the living wage – but too late. He is judged to have succumbed to deviationist tendencies, having once described his £250,000 annual earnings from columns in the yellow press – over 17 times the annual living wage – as ‘chickenfeed’.

Meanwhile, the renegade Mensheviks on the opposition benches could only bite their bourgeois-reactionary tongues.


Comments


  • 10 July 2015 at 11:02pm
    Peter Sanderson says:
    Yes indeed. Can't help thinking though, that with the total disarray of the Labour Party, vanishingly dismaying leadership options, a rampantly political and power-seeking Chancellor, that we need some beacons, not this...

  • 11 July 2015 at 8:20am
    sol_adelman says:
    Whole lotta fakin' goin' on . . .

  • 11 July 2015 at 8:26am
    cufflink says:
    Dear Glen, why are you so conciliaTory this morning in this matter of Osboncomics? In the sixth form at Eton they still read the Hotspur and think accordingly. Next year's budget will progress to the thriving wage and then to welcome the poor onto the top table and a taste of the overdone purloin, it will be the skiving wage (hard hats de rigueur) and so on. If ever the living wager (an apposite betting metaphor) retires, still carrying a Greek sized debt he will be given, if address known, tax relief on his vestments if and only if they are donated to charity as Thrift Aid.
    What an embarrassment is IDS with his parliamentary Heepish effulgent glow in servile deference to his house captain. What a fascistic insult to care was this sadistic budget.
    If we must look to a Soviet example let us first open Gorky once again.