Two little boys with bright red flowers/still trying to hide what’s really ours
On Day Two of The Slog’s investigation of Budget criminality, eight years after the event the crippling costs of national fraud committed by the Whitehall Sir Humphries turn up on Page 69 of the 2016 Budget Policy Costs Document. The time for everyone from the WASPIS via the Labour Party and the media to act is upon us.
Time marches on, and overtakes the single investigator: before I could write about over half a billion Pounds being cut from the budget for disabled personal aid appliances (hidden way down the list in the Policy Costings Document) the proposal was abruptly reversed yesterday. It is hard to imagine anyone of sound mind with a civilised background happy to watch disabled people having their welfare cut and being told they’re coughing up for more of what’s left to pay for a new prosthetic, but such is the Madness of King George.
When told they’ve grown too big for their boots, a majority of people will at least try to look contrite. Osbollocks simply goes out and buys bigger boots. (Hand made by Grensens, naturally). Osborne was defiant during the post Budget debate, and giggled in an ill-mannered way during McDonnell’s response speech.
Almost two years ago to the day, I posted to ask, “is this man fit to be in Government”? My point – that the bloke is seriously depraved – is a considered opinion on which I’ve never wavered. But there are still things that are passing (literally) unnoticed in the Budget Book.
Nobody spotted, for example, that Little Osborne saved £250m by not investigating a senior corporate expenses scam involving the use of ‘loans’ that lack only the paying-it-back thing. To Osbollocks and his vulturous entourage, this must look like a rich seam: “let’s legalise everything and save £11bn on the judicial system…surely nobody’ll notice, right?”
However, there is one huge element in there that goes back way, way beyond George…to those halcyon days of the Naughties when Gordoom McAspergers banished boom and bust – and then Saved the World when it did go, um, bust.
While busy telling we the lowly plebs that Things Could Only Get Better, the man without the Right Stuff nevertheless was in possession of all he needed to know about the Brown stuff.
During late 2004 and early 2005, Brown and five core members of his long-suffering Treasury team met to discuss something that was obsessing him: the accelerating move of British sovereign debt alongside a global banking cockup from which, he was sure, there would be few survivors. (In her memoirs, former Labour stalwart Clare Short writes about Gordon’s growing depression about it)
What happened next dwarfs the MPs’ expenses scandal as Jupiter dwarfs Mercury. And it is still sitting there in the National Debt total as ‘unfunded public sector pension schemes’.
The story goes back to Slogposts during 2010 and anon, after a now-retired Treasury official tipped me off about what had occurred. I won’t go through it all again now, but this post…
Senior Mandarin’s unfunded pension revelations
….is the best starting point, followed by some named names in this one…
We name the Fat pension Sir Humphreys
…..and then this follow-up from 2103 about Osborne’s inheritance of the problem:
The debt liability is 3 times bigger than you thought
The Sun headline, however, is this: despite two independent reports over the years since 2005 showing that Treasury estimates of Senior Whitehall personnel pension liabilities were 50% light, the real Truth was covered up: faced with what they thought in 2005 was approaching Armageddon, the Sir Humphrey clan DOUBLED the pension payout for the 600,000 top civil servants.
The measure bypassed the Public Accounts Committee, which means that legally the pension awards were embezzled from the taxpayer. And the bypassing of the PAC means it was done with the complicity of elected Ministers.
Consider the size of this heist: unfunded Civil Service pension liabilities today stand at £1.4trillion. 50% of the National Debt is down to the greed of 600,000 Sir Humphreys.
Indirectly as a result of this, around 325,000 Waspi women have been left destitute. But that was covered in great detail here yesterday.
Fast forward now to P. 69 of the 2016 Budget Policy Costings document. As with every cover-up involving bureaucrats, the heading is suitably anodyne:
The giveaway is ‘unfunded’, but it’s a rate change they promised to review, and now they are reviewing it, so what? In fact, this is damage limitation on a massive scale: the way to judge the scale of it is to note that the cut in GDP rating is just 0.2%. Yet this is how much that is going to SAVE the Exchequer in the 2019-21 period:
Ooooh look, £4bn. Bless me. That’s more than a WASPI reversal would cost.
But it’s just 0.2% of the total unfunded liabilities ‘pot’. You can’t make a direct percentage calculation, because nothing to do with Wonga is ever that easy. But you can give a rough estimate.
Not so much a pot as the world’s biggest cesspit of corruption: 1.4 TRILLION POUNDS.
Which – spookily enough – turns out to be what the Exchequer has now quietly accepted is the Civil Service pension fund liability….that suddenly, and unaccountably, doubled in the 2005-06 period.
This is the bottom line for Waspies: to reiterate what I was suggesting yesterday, the time may have come to stop playing softball with these gargoyles. Now that Osborne pudding and pies is in career freefall and the Treasury/DWP axis of evil is on the back foot, it’s time to take a large hammer and bash the softened steel.
This is the bottom line for the former Minister for Women Harriet Harman: whereTF are you on Waspis, Hattie? Why so quiet on the worst example of female inequality in modern history? Just too happy on your Unite-98% funded personal index-linked pension on top of the MP’s pension, is that it?
This is the bottom line for the Old Media set: I’ve been on this case now for nearly eight years, and the evidence pointing towards the world’s biggest fraud is still mounting. It is time you stopped ignoring me, and other folks like Nick Wilson, Peter Jukes, Anna Raccoon and a host of other contrarians speaking truth to power.
And this is the bottom line for the Labour Party: some of us out here are getting a tad fed up of doing your job for free. Some of us would like you to stop examining your haemmorrhoids, and start giving Camerlot the pasting it deserves on HSBC, Newscorp criminality, the distortion of the Jimmy Savile saga, WASPI pension-welching, and 600,000 bang-to-rights Whitehall embezzlement fraudsters.
The Slog 