Most people thought George Osborne's talk of an emergency Brexit budget was a mistake in June. It alienated voters and fuelled talk of Project Fear. Today though the Guardian has this headline:
Philip Hammond could face £80bn black hole following Brexit vote
The estimate is from the Resolution Foundation and is certainly within the parameters of possibility. And given that Hammond says he remains committed to balanced budgets and the austerity he wrongly thinks will deliver that then Osborne's plans may well be being dusted down right now. You can imagine Osborne smirking about that. No one else will be.
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Whatever his personal views may be, Hammond will be under enormous pressure to stick with an austerity narrative and this provides a perfect excuse. Tory policy gurus know that it resonates positively with most voters. “If we don’t get the debt under control bad things will happen!” Ezra Pound’s observation of many decades ago is ever more relevant: “In our time, the curse is monetary (economic) illiteracy, just as inability to read plain print was the curse of earlier centuries.” The household budget analogy is simply not going to evaporate until there is a progressive government in power with an unassailable majority. The last time such an opportunity arose was in i997 – and look how that turned out. As the UK is evolving into a Tory plutocratic hegemony, radical change is a distant dream until FPTP voting is ended. Happy Wednesday!
It troubles me that the Guardian still portrays this issue in the panic like terms that Osbourne & Co chose to use on purpose in order to justify very damaging economic policies.
All the Guardian is unwittingly doing is reinforcing ignorance and fear by using the term ‘black hole’. So much for balance.