This morning's short video has now been published. In it, I argue that the UK government's accounts for March 2023 have not been published as yet, and are well overdue. If Labour wants to govern well, it has to get on top of this issue – and report, as the private sector has to do, on a timely basis. Nothing less will do.
The transcript is:
The new UK government needs to get its accounts in order.
The last accounts that the UK government as a whole published were for the period to March 2022. We're now in July 2024.
If your tax return was that late, you would have been fined very heavily.
If you were a company that late with your accounts, you may well have been struck off the Register of Companies. You would have ceased to be.
But the UK government has not yet published its accounts for 2023.
If this government cannot get its accounting in order, it cannot explain to us why it has a right to tax and why it has a right to expend resources on our behalf.
Unless it gets its accounts in order, this government will fail because it won't be accountable.
And to me, that's utterly unacceptable.
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Would accounting for central and local government be improved by the re-establishment of a body charged with independent oversight like the Audit Commission? The cost is relatively modest, and subsequent experience shows that the idea that its functions can be more efficiently be provided by “the market” plus a regulator is plainly incorrect (neoliberal fundamentalism at work again).
Undoubtedly, yes
So long as it reports to both houses of parliament, not to the government! We’re still waiting for a large number of parliamentary reports given to the government around the last election…..
Very clearly the majority of British voters are “madder than March hares” for not understanding at least two things you don’t actually have true democracy without understanding how a fiat money really works and the difference in having their views represented by a PR or FPTP electoral system!
https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/18633267/