Spring Budget Week

Hello and welcome to this week’s Britain’s favourite Sunday sermon. Well, that was it, it was Budget week. All the excitement, all the noise but afterwards how excited really were you? Now let’s just go back a year shall we, to the budget in March 2023.

The Chancellor, the same Jeremy Hunt, he stood up and he said it was a Budget for growth. He also said a year ago that this is a great thing that we must all sort of bow down to the office for Budget responsibility. They promised us this time last year that there would not be a technical recession and the Chancellor was excited by that.

Well, here we are a year later and guess what, yes, the economy is in recession that’s been confirmed and what they haven’t talked about whether it’s the OBR or the Chancellor or the Prime Minister is that. We’re in the longest recession per person since records began almost 70 years ago. Just reflect on that, the longest recession per person.

So you’ve got an office that no one’s ever heard of called the Office of Budget Responsibility, bunch of bureaucrats. They say there won’t be a recession, the Chancellor says there won’t be a recession. There is a recession.

Why on Earth would you still listen to these people? The Chancellor this time around because of his embarrassment, he had to say well now, this year it’s a Budget for wait for it, long-term growth okay. So, the Budget for growth has failed, so now it’s a Budget not even for medium-term growth, no it’s a Budget for long-term growth some point in the future.

A Budget for Growth?

I tell you what how about a Budget for growth now if that’s okay with you, because frankly everybody is suffering. But oh no, we get a Budget for long-term growth and then they say brilliant this isn’t it that actually they’ve got a plan.

Yes, the Prime Minister and the Chancellor have a plan and the plan is working. Seriously are they deluded? I mean we’re in the longest recession per head in our lifetime in 70 years and they have the cheek and the gall to say the plan is working, unreal. They’re still listening to these people at the Office for Budget Responsibility. We all make mistakes, maybe they’ve been brilliant in the past and this is just a one-off error? Well, let’s look at their track record, shall we?

In the last decade or so the office for Budget responsibility set up by one George Osborne their cumulative errors and wrong forecasts total well over £500 billion. I know that’s an impossibly large number. I’ll simplify it. It’s half a trillion pounds, again it’s impossibly large. This wasn’t a one-off mistake. These people are surely incompetent, they are surely useless. In any other walk of life with that woeful track record guess what? They’d be fired for negligence and yet they’re still listened to by the Chancellor, as though their word is Gospel that we must bow down to.

We gather that actually, so much is their advice sort of treated like a religion that you can’t stray from it, let me tell how it works. In the world of business and how it should work in leading any entity whether it’s a charity, an institution, a business or a government. Advisers advise and directors decide that’s how it should work. You take advice from a whole bunch of different people and then you, the boss or the board of directors you actually have to then make a decision because the idea is that you yourself know what you’re talking about.

A Good Chief Exec is Needed

You yourself if you’re the director, if you’re the chief executive or the chairman or the Chancellor or the Prime Minister you’ve actually got a Scooby-Doo of a clue as to what you’re talking about. So, you can take the advice but you can then say well I agree with this but I think you’re completely wrong on that or I’ve listened to some other economists who give a different View and think if we do this we’ll get more growth in the short term.

What’s actually going on is that the treasury officials and the Office for Budget Responsibility economists they play a sort of merry-go-round you know they disappear into one office and then another. They swap jobs, it’s what goes on and what I call the Quangocracy of the Civil Service and the establishment.

Fundamentally if they keep getting things wrong they told us this same Office for Budget Responsibility that immigration large scale immigration is a good thing for the economy, really how’s that going? We’ve got the highest immigration ever in the last 2 years; 2022 net was 745,000. 2023 when the numbers come out in May net, I think will be around the 800,000 plus March and yet we’re in the longest recession since records began that is not a coincidence.

Wealth per head is Falling

Mass low-skilled immigration depreciates the actual working conditions the wealth per person of the existing population when you’ve got zero growth. We’re in this long recession and mass immigration is significantly to blame and yet these same people at the OBR and the treasury say that immigration is good for our economy. Well, it’s turned out to be absolute garbage wrong and at some point, someone’s got to have the courage to say we’ve messed up, we’ve screwed up.

We’ve got to change course because if we don’t, we’re literally heading to disaster, we’re heading to catastrophe. I’ve said it before a bad Chief Exec can ruin a good business in a couple of years. The problem here is that actually the wrong people have been giving the wrong advice to the leaders of the government who clearly don’t have any conviction, don’t understand how an economy works, don’t have the courage to get some alternative advice when things are going wrong.

Therefore, we’ve all ended up in a complete and utter pickle, we’re all getting poorer seriously poorer and it’s got to stop I’m afraid. Folks, if we don’t change course, if we don’t have politicians that seek some better advice, some different advice then we are heading towards disaster catastrophe and bankruptcy. But I’m an optimist, I still think it’s doable, a good Chief Exec, a good leader can turn this around. It will take a few years, but we can turn this around and with that I wish you a very happy Sunday.