Should we gloat at Christmas?

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It would be easy for those who have criticised George Osborne to gloat this Christmas.

His housing bubble is already bursting.

Growth has been downgraded to 2.6%.

Borrowing is going to well over £90 billion this year when he assured us it should be heading for our collective memories right now.

The balance of payments is heading to be a basis for a sterling re-evaluation.

GDP per head remains below 2008 levels.

Many people are still suffering declining real incomes and any upward adjustment is no compensation for long years of downward spiral.

Business investment is down.

The list of missed targets, broken promises and failed rhetorical claim is seemingly enough to make anyone who has said that all Osborne has done has been predestined, based as it was on obviously flawed dogma, wish to gloat in the pleasure of saying 'told you so' but I have to say that would be inappropriate.

It's inappropriate because the flawed dogma of austerity and of cuts that is based on the presumption that management of the state is equivalent to maintaining the finances of a corner shop and the household that lives above the premises prevails across too much of the political spectrum. And as yet no alternative narrative has captured popular imagination that remains gripped by a fear of debt without comprehending its reality in the case of a sovereign state with its own currency.

And it would be folly to be smug when Osborne's failure has been at cost to real people who have paid a heavy price for his malicious contempt for their needs.

In that case what should we feel at Christmas?

Anger is the first thing: anger that so much harm has been done by so few to so many, wholly unnecessarily.

Frustration is next: frustration is next, including that with the exception of our three women party leaders (Nicola Sturgeon, Natalie Bennett and Leanne Wood) there is no political back bone to fight austerity as yet.

Indignation would not go amiss: indignation that the media, including the BBC, seems dedicated to promoting Osborne's failed narrative.

And hope: hope that in 2015 we can change this.

I think that hope appropriate. Christmas is a time of rebirth, of new hope, and of energy to start again being released as a result of the rest we take.

We need hope. We need that energy. And we definitely need the change that rebirth represents.

So it isn't time to gloat, because that would endorse the suffering that's happened.

But it is time to hope we can end it in 2015.


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