Not only did George Osborne conjure up a cocktail of treats for the rich on Wednesday, an official forecast published alongside the Budget revealed something utterly astounding that the Chancellor tried his best to hide from the taxpayer.
Whilst the public was busy fawning over the highly publicised and incompetently irrelevant sugar-tax, RBS shares, acquired by the taxpayer in order to save the bank from collapse after the financial crash, are to be sold off by Osborne for LESS THAN HALF of the price we paid for them.
The UK taxpayer forked out a whopping £45bn pounds on buying up RBS shares, and now the Chancellor is ready to speedily offload them for a mere £22b.
This is despite George Osborne saying just last year;
“When you take the banks in total, we’re making sure the taxpayers get back billions MORE than they were forced to put in”
So not only has George Osborne failed on all the economic promises he set himself, he’s also brazenly lied to the public about making a profit on RBS shares.
So what could getting the full amount of this sell-off mean for our public services?
Firstly, cuts to PIP worth £4.4bn pounds could be stopped entirely. In fact, these PIP payment cuts, with the full £45bn pounds could be paid in their entirety five times over.
The full payment could also be used to help fix the shortage of nurses, meaning more frontline care for an NHS in utter crisis under the Tories. 103,000 nurses could be funded for 10 years.
It could also be put in to education, to build primary schools and prevent further inflating classroom sizes and over-worked teachers. 5,946 primary schools could be built if the taxpayer’s money were not being pushed up to the richest by Osborne’s RBS giveaway.
147,000 Affordable homes could be built. Real affordable homes, helping people to get onto the housing market, pushing down rent and house prices, and preventing the housing market from inflating further.
All these things could be paid for if Osborne prevents the massive loss of money from the selling of our shares in RBS.
Maybe, when RBS are making a net profit of 784m a year (2014), we should keep our shares, take our dividends and wait until RBS’ stock prices to increase, sell them and get what we deserve from these shares. But hey, that’s the prudent thing to do – something Mr Osborne seems utterly incapable of even contemplating.
It seems that our incompetent chancellor would much rather the British taxpayer make a loss of 22bn whilst the profitability of RBS recovers. We certainly are all in this together, the taxpayers of our country, the many, are all together being robbed of their hard earned money, whilst the Government uses that money to give away billions worth of shares to private interests.
To make matters worse for the Chancellor, the public are already starting to awaken to his inconspicuous incompetence. A recent BMG poll stated that 59% of the public have little or no faith in Osborne, showing that the budget was a complete failure for the Government. This, coupled with the resignation of Iain Duncan Smith and the revolts against many parts of the Chancellor’s Budget, highlight the total mismanagement and intentiaonal misallocation of public finances by the current Conservative Government – taking from the taxpayer, and transferring yet more wealth to the top 1%.
Credit to The Canary for statistics.
