OFFICIAL data shows that the UK state debt is equal to the country’s economic output for the first time since the 1960s, amid the new Labour government’s warnings about very tough fiscal decisions in the years ahead to be imposed on the working class!
The Office for National Statistics (ONS), the executive office of the UK Statistics Authority that reports directly to the British Parliament, said in a release on Friday that the public sector’s net debt ‘was provisionally estimated at 100 per cent of gross domestic product at the end of August.’
The data also showed ‘the highest August borrowing on record, outside the (Covid) pandemic,’ Darren Jones, a senior official at the UK Treasury, said in a statement.
‘Debt is 100 per cent of GDP, the highest level since the 1960s. Because of the £22 billion black hole in our public finances we have inherited this year alone. We are now taking the tough decisions now to fix the foundations of our economy,’ he added.
The debt-to-GDP ratio was at 99.3 per cent in July, with the ONS saying net borrowing in August reached £13.7 billion on increased spending on public services.
UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, whose Labour Party was elected in early July, had earlier warned Britons that the budget announcement on October 30 would be ‘painful’, with tax rises and spending cuts expected.
The British Labour government is already facing criticism from all sides over scrapping a winter fuel-benefit scheme for 10 million pensioners.
Starmer has repeatedly defended the move as a necessary ‘tough choice’ to help fill a £22-billion ($29 billion) ‘black hole’ in public finances which Labour claimed was left behind by the previous Conservative administration.
A British government watchdog last week forecast that UK state debt could almost treble over the next 50 years owing to an ageing population and climate change.
Official figures last week showed that UK economic output stalled in July, dealing a blow to the new government.
Britain is bankrupted, the pensioners are about to be starved and shiver in the winter cold, our Labour Party ‘political leaders’ are paralysed, but in contrast with the pensioners’ lack of warmth, Starmer, the Labour Prime Minister received a gift of £16,200 earlier this year for new clothes for his wife from Lord Alli, the Labour donor who had donated £500,000 to the Labour Party over two decades, receiving his peerage in 1998 from then-LP PM Tony Blair.
It has now emerged that the gift was for his wife’s clothing allowance and Starmer initially failed to properly declare the money, recording it as ‘private support for the office of the leader of the opposition’.
But a month later, his office updated the register of members’ financial interests to say the money was for ‘work clothing’, breaking parliamentary rules by not declaring Lord Alli’s gifts of money towards clothing for his wife.
Lord Alli also provided Angela Rayner, the Deputy PM, with the use of his $2.5 million Manhattan flat on the 56th floor in the US for free for a personal holiday in December 2023.
These recent media revelations have shone the spot-light into unexpected funding sources for the Labour Party and its top leaders, while the pensioners are sitting in the cold, and are about to be told, along with the working class, that the UK is in a black hole, and that it is their job to get the country out of it by making sacrifices.
This is a far cry from the founding of the LP by the trade unions in 1900 to represent them and the working class in Parliament and break from the betrayals of the Liberal Party.
Then, the sole financial source for the LP was provided by the trade unions, that still contribute millions of pounds annually.
Last year, the Labour Party received £15.6m – its highest ever donation amount – from wealthy individuals and companies in 2023, while it received just £5.9m from the trade unions, reflecting Starmer’s boasts that ‘Labour is the party of business’ and that ‘Britain is open for business’.
Lord Alli funded at least seven Cabinet ministers in a year-long campaign to ‘reshape’ the Labour Party. He has handed out £314,147 to members of Sir Keir Starmer’s front bench as part of a string of donations spanning almost two decades.
Delegates to the Labour Party Congress must demand that these leaders resign and make way for Labour Party leaders that are prepared to stand up to the bosses and not be their humble servants!
