Resisting the CleggerOsborne Cuts

Today's Guardian headline: Fears Grow of double dip recession. The service sector - 40% of our ill-balanced economy - is not doing smiley faces.

Just another straw in the wind that is blowing us onto the rocks, with The Boy George at the helm, crying "Steady as She Goes, we may hit the Rocks of Recession, but at least we will avoid the Hard Place of Lost Credit Rating".

Up to now, I have just been sitting waiting for it to happen, getting ready to market an I Told You So t-shirt.

But others are made of better stuff. Fair play to the Fawcett Society, which has filed papers with the High Court seeking a Judicial Review of the government's recent emergency budget.. The word is that they have a strong legal argument. Good. They'll need it. The Government will need a judge of the calibre of Lord Hutton on its side. No doubt they will find one.

Now Tony Benn, Caroline Lucas and 70 others have signed a letter to the Guardian calling for organised resistance to the cuts. Sign up here.

Osborne says that it is vital to reduce the budget deficit in order to preserve our AAA credit rating. It is, and it isn't.

Here for my global assessment of the UK economy.

We do have one of the biggest deficits of comparable countries, but other factors place us about 7th in line to be chomped by the money markets, behind an illustrious list that goes,from memory, Greece, Portugal, Spain, Japan and - wait for it - the USofA. (The most creditworthy nations, interestingly, are the egalitarian Nordic countries)  So if the man-eaters in the money markets want to get busy, they will be burping and groaning before they get to us. Either that, or politicians will have worked out a way of controlling them.

Always remember that the prats in spats who deal out nations' credit ratings are the same morons who gave the sub-prime mortgages their AAA rating.

So. Resist the Cuts. But how? As well as feet on streets (to oppose the prats in spats), we need a credible alternative strategy to reduce the deficit. We need a slow, steady, non-destructive approach to cutting public sector waste, based on Roots up Efficiency and Demand Side management.

Which are in my Parlous Situation blogpost, further down the page.