The road to ruin

According to the OECD, more than half of Britain's GDP now comes from government spending.

The figures from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) disclose that central and local government spending made up 52.1 per cent of Britain’s GDP last year.

Now I'm no economics expert, but the way I read that it says that we are not just spending 52% of our GDP on the public sector, but that 52% of our GDP comes from public spending - and that does not include the cost of bailing out the banks! Maybe I'm wrong - if so, perhaps someone can clear that up for me - but that's how it reads to me.

In other words, if our GDP is £1000 billion (I know it isn't) then £520 billion of that is government spending. In other words, our GDP without including what government spends is just £480 billion.

What is also obvious to me is that a government spending more than is raised in total from private enterprise - not just the total tax, but every penny that private business makes plus another 2% on top - is taking this country on the road to ruin. Even if the tax rate was 100% this government would still not raise enough to cover its spending!

It also blows wide open the myth of GDP growth. In the thirteen years since Labour came to power some 12% of our GDP growth didn't actually exist - it was just Labour spending. Personally, I think it is wrong to consider government spending as part of GDP - but these things are not designed to give us, the people, the full picture. They are designed to enable government to tell us whatever they want to - and before anyone blames Labour for this, it all started under the Thatcher government who were the first to start fiddling the figures.

Thus we've spent the last 20 years being told that everything in the garden was rosy. The truth is that inflation is much higher than claimed, unemployment is considerably more than we're told (1 in 3 people of working age are unemployed in London), our economy is on the rocks and being battered by massive waves of debt and this country is now in serious danger of ending up in the poor house.