What Osborne should say today.

Today Osborne announces the condition of the UK economy. If he told the truth, it would go something like this:

"As you may know - because some people have found the official accurate statistics and put them on twitter - we have increased the debt by more in four and a half years than Labour did in thirteen. This means they did not bankrupt the economy as we claimed.

It also makes a lie of our attempts to convince you all that Labour haven't got a clue how to run the economy because even though we've made massive cuts that have crippled public services and made the poorest people even poorer, we still haven't sorted out the deficit.

One of the biggest problems is tax receipts. Because despite our talk of there being more people in work than ever, people aren't paying enough tax. There are a number of reasons for this and all of them are our fault:

1) People are taking home less pay. Most of these new jobs we talk about all the bloody time are part-time and the less people earn, they less they pay in income tax. 

2) We have cut income tax at both ends of the income spectrum. To keep our wealthy chums happy, we cut the top rate of tax from 50p to 45p and despite our claims to the contrary (which completely defied logic and basic maths), those people are paying less tax. We have also cut the bottom rate of tax - again to keep our wealthy chums happy. You see, if we raised the minimum wage to a rate that people might actually be able to afford to live off, the big profit-making companies would have to foot the bill and we didn't want that. So instead, we raised the lower threshold so the poorest workers don't pay any tax at all.

3) We haven't dealt with tax avoidance. If anything, we're made it worse by giving more public money to huge multi-nationals such as Virgin who we know hide their profits off shore and use complicated avoidance schemes.

A second issue which is directly related to low pay is benefits. We try to convince you that the majority of 'welfare' goes to unemployed people. In fact, after pensioners, the biggest chunk of benefits go to those in work. And the less people are paid, the more taxes have to go on in-work benefits to subsidise peoples' incomes. So when we protect the huge corporations by allowing wages to remain low, we need more tax revenue to supplement poverty wages. And the more poverty wages there are, the less taxes we receive. 

Another related issue is falling consumer spending. Those businesses who do pay their taxes - usually the smaller ones - make less money when people have less to spend. Even people who are on quite good incomes are no longer able to spend as much money on goods and services that helps our economy to grow. Wages for everyone except the few at the top has fallen in real terms, whilst the cost of pretty much everything has risen. And if people aren't spending as much money, the retailers and service providers are paying less taxes.

So you see, I'm coming clean with this autumn statement. I know there's any number of cushy 'jobs' waiting for me when I leave government and I think there's a good chance that will happen next May. 

But why admit all this now? Why not just hide behind the power of the right-wing media? Well I got off my tits last week - as many of you will have seen from the footage from Prime Minister's Questions - and I had an epiphany. I was visited by a wild-eyed old lady who told me that I should change my ways and stop lying to the British public. I asked her what if I didn't. She said that the giant technicolour wasp-rat would haunt my dreams every night. I've had those dreams every night since and I've had enough."

So we can all look forward to that.