Basket-case joke of a country Venezuela devalues by 32% – oops, basket-case joke of a country Britain devalues by 40%

A couple of weeks ago, British journalists reported, probably with a slight frisson of schadenfreude, that the basket-case joke of a country Venezuela had devalued the bolivar by 32% to try to improve its collapsing economy. We probably all know what happened to Venezuela – a potentially rich, oil-exporting country voted in a bunch of economically incompetent, corrupt, socialist buffoons. These greedy, corrupt fools then proceded to wreck the country’s economy, wasting or stealing its huge oil revenues. Venezuela could have had new roads, schools, universities, hospitals, jobs. Instead it is a Third World toilet wracked by poverty and crime.

How different from Britain?. Well, actually not that different. Under the economic mismanagement of Brown, Balls and Miliband, Britain’s economy has been trashed in a similar way to Venezuela’s. But the British government didn’t have to devalue the pound, international markets did this for them. In recent weeks the pound has dropped by up to 10% against the euro and dollar. But the pound’s fall against real money – the Australian dollar, New Zealand dollar, Thai baht – has been much more dramatic. It has fallen by about 40%. Since 2007, the pound has gone from over 3 Singapore dollars to under 2: from 75 Thai baht to 47: from 2.6 Aussie dollars to 1.51: from 15 Swedish kroner to 10: from 2.5 Swiss Francs to 1.5. And such has been the economic incompetence of work-experience, part-time chancellor Osborne, that the pound has much further to fall.

You don’t notice this so much if you spend most of your time in Britain. But for the many tens of thousands who had hoped to escape imploding Britain by retiring abroad it has been a disaster. They are now trapped in the UK where they won’t receive proper medical care because priority will be given to two million Romanians and Bulgarians, where the Government can’t afford to pay a proper pension as it will need an extra £30bn a year to pay for the housing and benefits of two million Romanians and Bulgarians; where they’ll be afraid to leave their homes for fear of being robbed by the two million mostly criminal Romanians and Bugarians: and where they won’t even be able to sleep soundly in their beds as a Romanian and Bulgarian specialty is breaking into homes and torturing homeowners to reveal their pin numbers and other banks details.