Yesterday's budget speech by UK Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond included tax cuts, freezing of duties and significant investment. One would think that this was good news for most of our population, but not if you listen to the BBC.
Coverage of the budget by 'Auntie' has been entirely negative, concentrating on 'what if ?' scenarios, the most important being 'what if there is no deal on Brexit ?' Despite the substantial tax cuts and additions to the budgets for universal credit and the NHS, those invited to comment have been overwhelmingly niggardly in their remarks. It smacks of a left wing organisation being very selective in order to ensure that its own views are very much to the forefront.
Assorted Labour and Liberal politicians seem to have been given carte blanche to criticise the Chancellor at length, while a mish-mash of single mothers, nurses, OAPs and others have been trotted out to witter on about how there is nothing like enough to meet their wants and desires. It seems that the vast extension of state support which has been introduced in recent years has caused many people to forget that they have a primary responsibility to look after themselves and that they should not rely on the state to pay for their profligate ways.
The NHS absorbs an ever-increasing amount of money while wasting much of it on useless or cosmetic treatments; it commits resources to IVF for women who have simply not bothered to have children until late in life - why ? Money is pumped into a black hole for mental health services, an area which is largely subjective in nature; why was there so little mental illness when I was a boy but so much now ? It seems to me that much of it is invented by those who profit, that is, the assorted 'professionals' who provide the services they claim are so urgently needed but without there being any real evidence for.
If their presence on the BBC, and in other media, is truly representative of their numbers in society, there must be more single mothers now than at any time in our history; why, when sex education is everywhere and contraception is so readily available ? Are these women simply too stupid to understand the basic biology or to take the simplest of precautions ? Rather than expecting the state to pay for the resulting offspring, where are the fathers ?
Rather than debating these and other issues, the BBC simply puts forward those who bleat for more, in the fashion of Oliver Twist but with far less reason. We are blessed with the wisdom of John McDonnell, would be Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer, who would bankrupt our country but who is allowed to make the wildest of statements virtually unchallenged. Only a few days ago, he was allowed, by, I think, Nick Robinson to get away with saying that spending £90bn on assorted privatisations would be 'cost neutral'. Cost neutral, according to this Machiavellian of the Left, because the cash outlay would be matched in the government's accounts by the purchased assets; no mention was made of the source for the £90bn needed, nor of the need to finance and repay it, and Robinson made no effort to challenge McDonnell on this point, surely a major omission. In common with his Labour colleagues, McDonnell makes the most unsustainable claims and goes virtually unchallenged, while any and every Conservative statement on the economy is questioned, debated and criticised ad infinitum.
The budget was a decent one and the continuation of some small borrowing for a year or two more is of little consequence when set alongside the vast and ballooning deficit left by the previous Labour government and its financial wizard, Gordon Brown. Inevitably, it has taken a long time to bring the economy back into balance but there is now real light at the end of a very long tunnel; those who demand more public spending now, are the same as those who demanded it in the past and where did that lead ? Long before the financial crisis of 2007/8, the seeds had been sown by governments around the world, not least our own which had set upon a path of financial profligacy and state support the like of which had never before been seen. Allowing Corbyn, McDonnell and their friends to have the keys of Nos 10 & 11 would not just return us to those days, but to the dark days of the 1960s and 1970s when the lights went out, rubbish and corpses piled up and Chancellor Healey was forced to go on bended knee to the International Monetary Fund for help.
Once the matter of Brexit has been settled, which it inevitably will be by some fudge or other, the economy will bloom, aided by Chancellor Hammond's relative generosity. At that time, the prospect of a Corbyn led Marxist government will begin to recede into the distance where, with luck, it will simply whither away.
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