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By  David Craig, on April 18th, 2013 Today I’d like to show some pictures of what Britain will look like once hundreds of thousands (probably over a million) impoverished Romanians and Bulgarians move here.
Many will work hard:
So will their children:
Our town centres will be busy:
Very busy:
Our benefits system will shower money on the new arrivals:
They will use the money “earned” in Britain to build tasteful homes in their villages:
Oh, and here’s a photo of a policeman and a clown. Though, given how ineffective our politically-correct police are going to be protecting us from the coming crime tsunami, I’m not sure which is the policeman and which is the clown:
By David Craig, on April 17th, 2013 The four most important issues facing Britain are probably 1. Our rapidly rising national debt 2. Will we surrender our sovereignty to the corrupt, wasteful EU? 3. The tsunami of immigration from Romanian and Bulgaria about to overwhelm us 4. Will we commit economic suicide by sticking to the (totally unnecessary) carbon reduction targets in Ed Miliband’s ludicrous Climate Change Act?
On the subject of our national debt. As I’ve written before, this is increasing by £120bn a year, £329m a day, £14m an hour, £233,000 a minute, £3,900 per second. However, if you ask the great British public about this, over ninety per cent haven’t the slightest clue that our national debt is even going up. One piece of research is shown in the picture below:
An astonishingly gormless 70% of potential voters believe the Coalition is reducing our national debt. These dickheads (the majority of Brits) don’t understand the difference between “deficit” and “debt”. Then there’s another wonderfully stupid 21% who seem convinced that running a deficit of £120bn a year doesn’t add anything to our national debt. And finally, there’s a mere 9% who realise that if you keep borrowing, your debt increases.
Given the political and economic illiteracy of around 91% of Brits, I’m finding it difficult to think of anything to write here. If 91% of potential voters don’t understand that continuously borrowing money leads to greater debt, how are they going to make an intelligent choice at the 2015 general election?
In despair, I can only conclude that Ed “borrow-borrow” Balls will be our next chancellor and that when our debt hits 120% of GDP around 2017, 91% of British voters will be rather surprised when international markets lose confidence in Britain’s finances, the interest we pay on our national debt shoots up to unsustainable levels, the value of the pound plummets and that nice Mr Balls is forced to impose cripplingly punitive (confiscatory) taxes on the £4trn we hold in savings and pensions.
Still, looking on the bright side – anyone with savings will be impoverished so we really will all be in it together, apart of course from politicians, bureaucrats and bankers who will continue to plunder our money at will.
By David Craig, on April 16th, 2013 Today, I’ve got to be really really careful – it’s definitely ‘tiptoeing on broken glass’ time. One wrong word and I’ll be accused of racism by the usual politically-correct handwringers. So I’ll just show the official unemployment rates by the main ethnic groups and raise a couple of issues:
1. Unfortunately, these figures don’t split out Chinese as an ethnic group. If they did, I imagine that the unemployment rate amongst Chinese immigrants would be somewhere around one or two per cent.
2. Very interesting is the extremely high unemployment amongst Pakistanis and Bangladeshis (most of whom would be Muslims). I’m sure the professional handwringers would blame this high unemployment on racial discrimination rather than a disinclination to work and a tendency to prefer living off benefits in these two communities. But then, why is unemployment so much lower amongst Indians (most of whom would be Hindus)? After all, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and Indians all come from the same geographical area and should suffer from similar levels of supposed “discrimination”. Could the high unemployment amongst Pakistanis and Bangladeshis and low unemployment amongst Indians suggest there are some cultural differences between Muslims and Hindus which make it more likely that Hindus will be employed? Could it be that Hindus value education and self-reliance, whereas ……..?
I know what I think. But I would probably be prosecuted by the police for expressing my opinion. With only around 2,000 burglaries happening in Britain every single day, our police apparently have plenty of time to persecute anyone daring to express politically-incorrect views – it’s much easier than catching burglars.
By David Craig, on April 15th, 2013 Yes I know Cameron is a spineless liar and I know Osborne is an incompetent, economically-ignorant buffoon who should have stuck to folding napkins in Selfridges (the only proper job he has ever had). But bad as Britain’s situation is, I think that anyone with even the slightest understanding of current affairs – about 6% of the population – will view with horror the thought that in 753 days this creature will become our next chancellor
How do I know that only 6% of the population have any knowledge of current affairs? Because a survey was conducted amongst voters asking whether they thought Osborne was reducing national debt, keeping it at about the same or increasing it by over £600bn. Only 6% of voters understood that Osborne was increasing national debt. A shocking 45% thought he was reducing our debt. That means 94% of voters don’t understand the difference between “deficit” and “debt”.
So what can we expect from Chancellor Balls? Probably a continuation of the Brown/Balls Spendathon – hundreds of billions borrowed and wasted and perhaps Britain even giving up its EU rebate to curry favour with Barroso. Then our interest payments will hit £80bn a year, we’ll no longer be able to borrow anymore and we’ll gave to go crawling to the Troika for a bailout.
Still, at least we’ll have the pleasure of seeing the repulsive Balls being forced to impose massive spending cuts to undo the damage he and Brown did when they tried to bankrupt Britain. Or will Balls cut at all? More likely he’ll raise taxes and then raise taxes and then raise taxes and just for good measure raise taxes once more. Under Labour we once had a top rate of tax of 98% – could Mr “borrow-borrow” Balls take us back towards those levels?
By David Craig, on April 14th, 2013 Our Government refuses to tell us how many Romanians and Bulgarians will come to Benefits Britain. So, I’ll tell you – between one and two million. How do I know? Because Italy and Spain have removed restrictions and there are 997,000 Romanians and over 70,000 Bulgarians in Italy and 920,000 Romanians and 170,000 Bulgarians in Spain. Given that Britain has more jobs and more generous benefits than Italy or Spain, we can expect at least a million (probably closer to two million) to come here.
And when they arrive, they can all get a helpful booklet from the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) in their own languages which explains all the benefits they can claim (see below)
A worker in either country will probably only earn about £175-£200 per month. So here’s just a taste of what they’ll be given if they move to Benefits Britain.
The DWP says the average claimant (across all nationalities) receives £390 a month in housing benefits and £65 a month in council tax benefits. They can also claim £88 a month for their first child and £58 a month for any child after that. It means someone with three children could collect £660 a month in benefits – three times what they can earn working in their own countries. If they have five or six children, they’ll be pocketing what for them would seem a fortune. Then when you add in unemployment benefits, jobseekers’ allowance, disability living allowances and God knows what else, most Romanian and Bulgarian families will get four to five times as much in benefits in Benefits Britain than they would from working in their own countries. Plus they’ll get free schooling and free healthcare.
And this, of course, doesn’t include the huge amounts Romanians and Bulgarians can earn from sending their children out to beg or steal and which they can get from burglary, metal theft, faked car crashes and all sorts of other money-making schemes. And they can be secure in the knowledge that our useless, politically-correct police won’t act against them for fear of being called racist by the BBC.
So you have to wonder – why would any of the 29 million Romanians and Bulgarians remain in their own countries when they can live what will seem to them a life of luxury in Benefits Britain?
Of course, that nice Mr Cameron says he’s clamping down on people who move to Britain just for the benefits. But given that it’s Barroso not Cameron, who decides who can come to Britain and what benefits they can get, we can pretty much ignore anything Cameron promises.
By David Craig, on April 13th, 2013
By David Craig, on April 13th, 2013 By the time the self-delusional, economically-ignorant, financially-incontinent Ed Balls becomes our next chancellor in May 2015, our national debt will have passed £1.4trn (100% of GDP). A year later, debt will be over £1.52trn (almost 110% of GDP). A general rule of thumb is that a country is bankrupt when government debt hits 120% of GDP. We’ll be there by 2017. Our annual interest payments were £30bn in 2010, are £43bn this year and will be £64bn+ by 2016 – an increase of over £34bn under the Coalition farce. Moreover, by 2017 one and a half million Romanians and Bulgarians will have moved to Britain costing us at least £15bn a year in housing, schooling, healthcare, policing and benefits.
To avoid national bankruptcy, Chancellor Balls will have to find somewhere around £50bn a year to cover our increasing interest payments, to support the huge influx of economic immigrants and to start paying down our debt by at least £10bn a year. So, where’s Mr Balls going to find this £50bn? He could cut welfare spending by 10% (that’s £20bn), he could cut the NHS budget by 10% (another £10bn) and he could cut…… Except Mr Balls is not going to cut anything. Instead he’s going to try to get growth by increasing government spending, because Mr Balls believes in his own (and Gordon Brown’s) unique fairy-tale version of Keynsian economics – you borrow-spend-waste during a boom and you borrow-spend-waste even more during a bust.
Here’s how our government currently takes in £589bn in taxes a year (while gaily spending £710bn a year):
Looking at these figures, hopefully you can see the massive tax increases Balls would need to inflict on us to rescue Britain from bankruptcy, while spending and wasting even more than the hapless Coalition.
But Labour won’t dare push up the taxes paid by their voters – income tax, VAT, council tax, fuel duty and so on. Instead Balls will target the supposed “rich” and make a huge tax grab for our money under the banner of “fairness”. It will never occur to Balls and Miliband that one reason we’re going bankrupt is that Benefits Britain has become a magnet for the feckless, lazy, dishonest and parasitic.
So we can expect a raid on our £850bn of pension savings – a special 2% tax, for example would raise £17bn. Stamp duty on buying shares will probably double. Tax on share dividends will double. There could be a special “emergency” property tax or land tax or there will be some kind of “mansion” tax. There could even be a tax on our £550bn of savings – a 1% levy would raise £5.5bn to be given to those who can’t be bothered to work.
There are just a few random thoughts – no doubt Mr Balls has lots more ideas how to take money from the responsible and hand it over to the those who make no contribution to our country.
By David Craig, on April 12th, 2013 In a blog like this, I’m bound to highlight eye-catching horror stories to show what’s happening in the world. But is everything really as gloomy as it sometimes seems from the headlines? There are some major threats to our well-being – these include:
1. Our national debt – at some point – maybe £1.4trn or £1.5trn or £1.6trn – our debt must stop rising and there could be a massive financial crash that will make the 2007/8 implosion look like a picnic. Then the government will have to make real cuts – not the tinkering around we see today. The problem is that if the Tories are in power after 2015 and make the necessary cuts, there will be strikes and riots. But if Labour are in charge, they will carry on spending on those who contribute nothing and impose punitive tax increases on those who work, crushing what little industry we have left.
2. Collapse of the EU debt ‘house of cards’ – the Club Med countries are bankrupt and their economies are contracting by the day making their situation ever worse. But if any country were to leave the euro, this would cause a massive bank collapse in other countries like France (banks exposed to $489bn of Club Med debt), UK (banks exposed to $392bn) and even Germany (banks exposed to $478bn). So, to protect EU banks, the EU must somehow keep the whole thing together as removing just one card will cause a monumental crash across the whole continent. And this time, if a major bank goes under, it will be shareholders and depositors who will pay.
3. Europe committing economic suicide to fight non-existent global warming – for every coal-fired power station we close, China and India build 30 to 40 new ones. Every new “green” tax we impose, makes our industry uncompetitive and shifts jobs to Asia. We are slowly strangling Europe’s economies to save the world from “global warming” that isn’t actually happening. But our leaders can never admit they got it wrong. The UK is particularly at risk because Ed Miliband was responsible for our ludicrous carbon reduction targets and he may be our next PM.
4. One to two million Bulgarians and Romanians coming here – this week, workers at the Louvre in Paris went on strike to try to force the police to act against the hordes of Roma gypsy children thieving from staff and visitors. Apparently Paris is now over-run by Romanian and Bulgarian criminals and beggars. Next year this will be coming to a town near you – there will be a massive rise in street crime and burglaries. But anyone who dares to protest will be branded a racist by our impotent political leaders who have allowed this to happen.
But looking on the bright side – we quickly forget that every generation has to live through some kind of crisis. For my parents’ generation, it was WW2. For the generation before that – the Great Depression. Before that – WW1 and so on. Compared to what other generations have experienced, perhaps our problems are relatively minor. We’re richer than any other generation. We’re incredibly generous to those who can’t (or can’t be bothered to) work. And we’ve got better health care, in spite of Sir David Nicholson’s attempts to rid us of our elderly. So, maybe we’ve actually never had it so good?
By David Craig, on April 11th, 2013 After yesterday’s brief visit to that earthly paradise – North Korea – I’m afraid it’s back to bankrupt Britain today.
When all the supposed “experts” are pontificating about chancellor Osborne’s economic policy (or lack of), they tend to lamely conclude that Osborne’s plan for reducing the deficit is having to be pushed back a few years. What they usually don’t mention is the catastrophic effect this delay is having on our national debt – increasing at £3,800 per second, £228,000 per minute, £14m per hour, £329m per day, £10bn a month, £120bn per year. This rising debt means that our annual interest payments will shoot up from £30bn at the 2010 election to £43bn this year to £64bn by 2016 – an increase of £34bn a year from 2010 to 2016
So, what can we cut to pay for this £34bn increase in our annual interest payments? Well, we could scrap the police. Whoops – that will only save about £19bn. But if we also close all prisons and release the prisoners, that would take us up to £30bn (see chart) So, just £4bn short of what we need to save.
Or we could get rid of all our armed forces – about £40bn – that would do it. Or halve spending on education? Or cut the NHS budget by a third? Or make a 20% reduction in all pensions and benefits payments?
The problem is that these drastic and politically-impossible cuts would only allow us to keep up with our increasing interest payments. They would do nothing to reduce the deficit. So our debts and interest payments would keep on going up.
I don’t know why, but few if any journalists and experts seem to understand the seriousness of our economic situation. We are caught in an ever-worsening spiral of more borrowing leads to higher interest payments lead to more borrowing leads to higher interest payments lead to more borrowing……….. At some point, we’re going to hit a very solid wall, when we can no longer borrow at affordable rates and the resultant financial crash is going to be very messy indeed.
Most people seem to think the financial crisis is over – it hasn’t even begun.
(Tomorrow, I’ll look at what taxes chancellor Ed Balls would have to raise to pay for Osborne’s Brownian borrowing binge)
By David Craig, on April 10th, 2013 It’s clear North Koreans have plenty to eat:
That they work hard and party hard:
That many North Korean leaders are irresistibly attractive:
That their navy is truly formidable:
That their air force will crush the Yankee imperialist paper tigers:
That their army is ready and raring to go:
In fact, the only difficulty their military could have will be getting past the perpetual traffic jams on North Korea’s glorious motorways:
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