Britain’s ‘Roadrunner’ economics

Monday-Tuesday blog

Hopefully most readers remember the Roadrunner cartoons in which a bird, Roadrunner, gets chased by Wile E. Coyote. Most episodes ended with Wile E. Coyote running over the edge of a cliff:

Then he keeps on running as if nothing is wrong. Finally, he looks down and gravity takes over:

This could seem somewhat similar to Britain’s economic situation. Every indicator of economic performance is going over the cliff. Our national debt rises ever upwards:

Our economy seems unable to grow:

We have some of the world’s highest energy prices and this is slaughtering jobs in manufacturing:

Our share of global GDP is shrinking to an embarrassingly low level:

And our useless, work-from-home, jobs-for-life, incompetent civil service is out of control:

The latest economic news is that the UK economy grew by a ‘massive’ 0.6% in the first quarter of 2024. But any idiot government can grow GDP. Just let in hundreds of thousands of legal and illegal uneducated, workshy, unemployable, parasitic migrants, borrow billions to pay for these migrants to live lives of leisure at taxpayers’ expense and, hey presto, you’ve supposedly got economic growth.

Meanwhile the ludicrously-misnamed Office for Budget Responsibility informs us that: ‘In 2022-23, we expect debt interest spending to total £83.0 billion. That would represent 5.2 percent of total public spending, and is equivalent to £1,900 per household and 2.5 per cent of national income.’ Though debt interest is expected to rise in 2023/4 to around £116bn, making debt interest the third highest item of government expenditure, much higher than education, policing or defence:

Yet as we approach an election, our economically-challenged politicians witter on about how they’re going to spend more on defence, spend more on the NHS, spend more on border security, spend more on building homes, spend more on (fill in whatever latest promise our waste-of-skin politicians have made).

This can’t go on. At some point, as ex-PM Truss and her sidekick Khazi Kwarteng found, economic gravity must hit the UK just as real gravity hit Wile E. Coyote – borrowing costs will rocket upwards (if we can borrow at all), the pound will crash and Britain will achieve its well-deserved status as a Third-World country.

When this happens, I wonder if all the countries to which we sent (expensively-borrowed) billions in supposed ‘foreign aid’, most of which was enthusiastically looted by those countries’ kleptocrat rulers and spent on palaces, whores and fleets of Mercedes, will help us out?