Ireland’s Debt Crisis: But What About Britain’s?
Much current media attention is focused on the £7 billion extra which British taxpayers will have to stump up to bail out Ireland — but no-one has taken the time to look at Britain’s sovereign debt levels which are nearly identical to that of Ireland.
The debt crisis — caused largely by state bailouts of national banks which foolishly invested in the subprime housing market in America — has seen Ireland’s government deficit rise to 14.3 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP).Next on the list of countries to be hit, according to media, will be Spain (which has a deficit of 11.2 percent of GDP) and Portugal (which has a deficit of 9.4 percent of GDP).
The British government is magnanimously offering to help bail out Ireland, and under an already signed agreement, Britain can be required to offer guarantees to other EU countries until 2013.
This means that the British taxpayer could be called upon to pay up for the inevitable “crisis” in Portugal and Spain.
However, what the controlled media is till now ignoring is Britain’s deficit to GDP ratio, which is 12.6 percent — higher than both Spain and Portugal.
Britain’s national debt situation is even worse. The UK’s national debt is the total amount of money the British government owes to the private sector and other purchasers of UK gilts.
From figures published in October this year, UK public sector net debt was £952.8 billion, or 64.6 percent of GDP (Source: Office National Statistics).
The ONS says that “excluding financial sector intervention,” (i.e. the bank bailouts) public sector debt is £842.9 billion or 57.2 percent of GDP.
Furthermore, the ONS said, annual government borrowing for 2010/11 is forecast to be £149 billion or 12.6 percent of GDP.
These figures show that Britain's public finances are in fact worse than those of Greece, never mind Ireland. Greece’s deficit to GDP ratio was 12.7 percent when it was bailed out.
Yet still, by some twisted logic, the British taxpayer is still being made to subsidise Eurozone member nations, even when Britain is itself staggering on the brink of disaster and is not even a Eurozone member.
In fact, the only reason why Britain’s economy has not yet gone to the wall is because British debt is much longer term in nature, which makes “continual refinancing easier” — in other words, they can postpone the inevitable longer in Britain.
The British National Party views with sympathy all European nations who have been sucked into the EU swindle, our own folk included, and also those ordinary people who are now going to be punished to baling out the banksters and who must pay for the incompetence of their political rulers.
There is only one solution to the present problem: the voters of Britain, and all other European nations, must turn to nationalist parties in their countries to provide strong, independence-minded leadership and break the curse of globalisation which lies behind most of the crises we face.
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