Squiddly "In my professional opinion, we cannot borrow any more without risk of a credit downgrade, breach of financial covenants and default."
The problem with the Labour party is that it categorically does not understand high finance: in particular, the creation and destruction of money. And high finance destroys Labour governments every single time. You would think they would learn, but they never do.
"Could a Tory voter please explain to me why these cuts have to hit the poorest in our society and not the richest?"
I am not actually a "Tory voter". I am, weirdly, on the radical left but I stayed still and everything moved around me to the point where the Conservative spending plans are, in my view, the most viable for the overall economic security of the ordinary Brit in the medium to long term.
The first thing to consider is that you are seeing this problem from the wrong end. The real crux of the matter is that it is very tricky to write tax policy that hits "the rich" in our globalised and trans-European climate. It is not as though our elite are bound by land holdings in Britain and we can offset spend through increasing death taxes on estates anymore. Money can now cross borders with abandon, and any attempt to arrest, for example, capital flight creates an enormous ripple effect that ends up ... as we saw in Cyprus ... with dead ATMs and ordinary people having their life savings scalped.
The modern rich have money, by default, and the modern rich can move -- pretty much anywhere they want. They can escape, as the Greek elite did when Syriza came to power.
They can also employ better accountants and lawyers and bankers than the state can, which is one of the reasons why the FSA crumbled in the face of the CDO shenanigans of the noughties. What choice does an excellent analyst make when faced with a £50K role at a government department or a £220K role at a investment bank in their derivatives division?
Anyway, I am getting off the point. The thing is when you are talking about "the rich" in Britain, you need to look at a range of issues. First ... who, what and where are they? A lot of the super rich in Britain are not actually British citizens and their residency status is in flux. Second ... where is their wealth? Again, many of their assets are in holdings that are international, or registered in other territories. A lot of said holdings have head offices in other EU states, with different tax policies -- all of which is legal under EU law.
It is not uncommon for very wealthy people to actually have no money or property or cars or even a TV. All those things will be owned by an entity which, when you trace it back, may very well be in Belize.
So if you say okay, lets try to get those a few notches down and look at the well-off ... ie. those that earn over £300K a year. When you actually examine where this income goes, you will tend to find it funnels through some sort of company structure or tax-efficient vehicle with various investment write-offs here and there. It is the same thing, just on a smaller scale. Lets be real here: David Beckham is simply not on PAYE.
The point here is that the rich are rich because they can pretty much reduce their tax bill to as little as possible, and globalisation has handed them the world on a plate. Trying to pretend that we can do much about this without a wholesale global effort on the part of every national state, which is never going to happen ever, is make-believe.
There are things we could do but they would have massive implications. We could withdraw from globalisation, or leave the EU, or adopt the US system of paying tax on incomes made in other territories ... but I suspect we would accidentally find a conflict appearing on our streets out of nowhere (yes, I am that cynical).
So this is why ordinary people face the brunt of the cuts and other more subtle methods of balancing the books.
Because, to be blunt, we cannot run away.