Can't see why this guy is surprised? He obviously doesn't read the CommonSense Party UK blog!!
Here’s a startling, though depressingly unsurprising, factoid I came across while – sad bastard that I am – digging around in the Office for National Statistics data base. Britain has not had a surplus in trade since 1982, or nearly thirty years, and even back then, it was only the gusher of still relatively new North Sea oil development that sustained it. The current account, which includes income on overseas investment, looks little better. There’s been no current account surplus since 1984.
I’ve added up the numbers in this sad history of shame, and the brutal truth is that since 1984 Britain has spent a sum more than it has earned equivalent to well over half of the country’s entire national income, or in round numbers, £700bn. I’m reminded of Mr Micawber’s famous recipe for happiness. “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.”
In Britain, we long ago forgot about the importance of living within our means. The consequent misery visited on us in the financial crisis is the modern equivalent of the debtors’ prison to which Mr Micawber was eventually condemned. Yet still we don’t seem to have learned our lesson. Despite a near 25pc devaluation in the pound since the start of the financial crisis, one of the biggest devaluations ever – which should in theory make British goods and services more competitive – we are still importing far more than we are exporting. Last year, the current account deficit was again on the increase, to 2.5pc of GDP.
I’ll be reflecting on how little we have learned from the profligacy of the past in a longer column for the Daily Telegraph later this week.
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