M Star letter on Osborne`s "incompetence"

Your editorial was absolutely correct to emphasise how "the holes in the Chancellor`s strategy are becoming more apparent" by the day (Morning Star,08/01/16). How typical of George Osborne to divert blame from himself and find the reasons for British economic growth stuttering in a "cocktail" of Chinese economic problems, falling oil prices, and conflict in the Middle East; it`s not as though these problems are a sudden phenomena. A decent chancellor would already have reacted to these problems when they first arrived, or even were forecast, and have modified policies accordingly; a small increase in fuel duty, for example, would not have gone amiss, and actually have been in line with a greener environmental policy, apparently supported by this government since the United Nations Climate Change Conference.

    If "the threat of conflict" between Saudi Arabia and Iran is of such concern, one might have expected wholesale condemnation of the "senseless assassination" of the Shia cleric, Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr, whose only crime was to support that so-called "core British value", democracy, during the Arab spring. Instead, we get the fawning Tory Foreign Secretary, Philip Hammond, pathetically refusing to "condemn the Saudi Arabian execution of 47 people",and dismissing the victims as "convicted terrorists" (Morning Star,09/01/16).

    Osborne`s speech of impending doom, which has nothing to do with his austerity measures and City-favouring policies, of course, was clearly a warning to the people of the UK that the worst is yet to come, prosperity is far from being around the corner, and his plans to reduce the deficit are way off the mark. As the possible, future leader of his party he cannot be seen for the economic incompetent that he most certainly is. That description, according to the Tory propaganda machine, and its media allies, belongs only to one man, and he, again according to their gospel, is unelectable! At least that is what they keep telling us.

 As the Tories appear to have a sudden fondness for everything Shakespearian, judging by last week`s PMQs, it seems appropriate to quote a line from Hamlet back at them: they "doth protest too much"!