Polly Toynbee on the budget

A budget for Tory blowhards and Redwood dreamers | Polly Toynbee http://gu.com/p/36ckt

Could this be Osbornes's 10p tax moment? They certainly seem to have miscalculated this badly, or they were so arrogant that they didn't care...

The politics of the budget

The politics of the Budget are clear – and the holes are becoming clearer too | Alastair Campbell

The politics of envy

Remember when the right used to accuse the left of 'the politics of envy': unfairly demonising the rich and sucessful? Now the Tories are engaged in a new version: demonising the poor and unemployed in favour of the rich top 1%. Poor workers are played against benefit claimants and public sector workers (for example over housing benefit, pay and pensions). The poor are also accused of somehow causing the recession, along with it being blamed on too high government spending (the bankers are somehow not to blame). I think this is wrong for the following reasons:

1) Most housing benefit is claimed by workers on low incomes not the unemployed. It essentially subsidises low pay and high rents, especially in the south. If the government was really concerned with rocketing HB, they would impose rent controls. As it is they are using HB as a weapon of social engineering.

2) It was the bankers who created the conditions for the recession, by pushing people into debt and comoditising bad debts. Deregulated banks cause recessions (most of the recessions of the 1800s were caused by banks over lending, as was the slump of the 1930s).

3) The rate of Job Seekers Allowance for a single person is £71 per week: out of this you have to pay everything except rent and council tax. We have one of the lowest level of benefits in Europe, and they are also harder to claim.

4) The recession was not caused by too high government spending, however much the right seems to think it was. Finally, Spain - NYTimes.com demostrates that the spanish government was running a surplus and had a lower national debt than Germany before it imploded.

But of course facts can't get in the way of creating a right-wing narrative.

The right-wing frenzy continues...

Cameron faces battles on two fronts over infrastructure plans | Politics | The Guardian

The Tory-led government now wants to privatise our roads. After all, the privatisation of the railways went so well, and led to cheaper fares. Oh, wait...

The funniest part was the BBC talking about toll roads in France. These are run by the government to help finance the (state run) SNCF. D'oh.