So, I've been wanting to talk about the shocker that happened earlier this month for weeks. I am, naturally, talking about the election that had Cameron doing the conga all the way back into No. 10.
Before I do, though, I want to clear something up for people by defining what everyone was expecting to happen, which is a hung parliament. This isn't some stupid form of suicide, or silly slang about how many dicks are in power, but it IS what happens when no single party gets the accepted majority of 326 seats.
In this election, the Tories managed to boost their seats from 306 to 330, in the middle of the SNP pulling a power version of William Wallace from Labour in Scotland, and the Lib Dems and UKIP getting slaughtered through the whole thing.
I can't help thinking that this is an amazingly good thing.
Firstly, the UK's borrowing has come DOWN. In March of this year, it was calculated that borrowing for the 2014 - 2015 year was £87.3 billion. Now, that might not sound particularly great, but hold your horses.
The independent Office for Budget Responsibility had calculated that the borrowing for the same year would be £90.2 billion. So not only has it comfortably undershot the estimates, it is also £11.1 billion less than the deficit of the year before.
Now, I'm no great mathematician, and economics and business studies is like handing me the riddle to the universe. But you would think that anyone that could pull that out of a hat of spending cuts, is worth keeping in power for another five years!
On top of that, the deficit was calculated as a percentage of the Gross Domestic Product or GDP. Can I please just point out that, in 2009 - 2010, borrowing was up to an all time, atrocious high of £153 billion - 10% of the GDP!!! Since the coalition took over in 2010, that has come down over half to 4.8%. Now to be fair, that's not even nearly enough. But it's far better than leaving the finances anything like they were.
Secondly, let's take a look at the other side. The Lib Dems, unfortunately, have everything in the political system of the UK working against them. They're only around to give the public a third choice, and very few people take them seriously. UKIP is so focused on immigration that they barely have any policies for anything else.
And Labour... oh, dear. Why oh WHY would anybody want this party in power when key figures in their hierarchy have said that they don't think they did anything wrong economically in the run-up to the 2010 election.
Plus, this is the party that knocked up the Ed-stone. WHY? Why put your policies on an eight-foot tablet, when a) your policies can and probably will change, and b) it's bad enough your leader looks like a character out of Wallace and Gromit!
Basically, the economy needs to go through fat-camp - a very, very thorough fiscal diet, and I can't help thinking that the Conservatives are the only party that can put the economy through that kind of boot-camp.
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