Man in a Shed: Fleet Air Arm

Saturday, November 14, 2009

And so it begins

The RAF are poised to announce savage cuts shortly, in an attempt to pre-empt other cuts to follow.

The cuts they are probably aiming for may well help kill the Fleet Air Arms fast jet capability (by wiping out the Harrier squadrons), and also are a tacit acceptance that the UK will be unable to undertake any large offensive operations in the near future and perhaps also unable to defend itself for any period of time ( the cut in airborne early warning aircraft show this).

Inside government, below the level of ministerial denial and lies to the public things are clearly very desperate indeed.

This is just the beginning. What follows will be painful and humiliating and it is all the fault of Gordon Brown and his arrogance and wilful destruction of one of the worlds most successful countries and economies.

The pound in your pocket

"We used to think that you could spend your way out of a recession and increase employment by cutting taxes and boosting government spending. I tell you in all candour that that option no longer exists." James Callaghan

“The trouble with theoretical economists is that they don't understand that when you have a deficit, you can only finance it by borrowing, and you've got to persuade people that it's worth lending money to you and that they'll get their money back... there's no way of escaping it.” Dennis Healey during the 1976 Stirling Crisis.

"Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens ... Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of over-turning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose." John Maynard Keynes, 1920.

"To preserve [the people's] independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our selection between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude." Thomas Jefferson, President of the United States of America,1801-1809.

Inflation is taxation without legislation .. Milton Friedman