The sheer madness of Gordon’s state of denial became clear yesterday.  He stood there at PMQs and claimed spending would grow 0%.  He has set himself a dividing line alright, it is the line between economic reality and economic fantasy.  He is on the wrong side of that dividing line.

Andrew Grice reports that the rest of the Cabinet, including the Chancellor, wants him to take a reality check.  They have agreed to admit there will be some cuts out of necessity, but to argue that the Tories will cut more, this was the position that Mandelson argued for originally.  At PMQs Cameron and Clegg were united against Brown – the LibDem leader accused him of “living in complete denial”.  It appears the Cabinet agrees.  It remains to be seen whether or not they can get the Prime Mentalist to change his “no cuts” tune.

If you wade through the numbers in the Treasury’s recently released Public Expenditure Statistical Analyses 2009 (page 83), you can see the Tories are right about the government’s own plans to cut spending on services in real terms in 15 out of 25 departments in 2011.  Gordon’s lying has lost him the argument about cuts, the reality is it that it is a question about the degree and timing of cuts.

The UK economy contracted an horrific 2.4% in the first quarter of 2009, its biggest quarterly decline in 51 years, according to the latest ONS data released today. This comes on top of the OECD saying we can expect a severe recession to come. Didn’t brown and Darling tell us last year that the economy would be on the up by this July?  Still a day to go…

Mervyn King’s testimony yesterday was shocking, he made public that the Bank of England was not consulted on Alistair Darling’s plans for the reform of banking regulation.  Call Guido old fashioned, but he somehow thinks that it might be a tad useful if the former student Trotskyite turned Chancellor, Alastair Darling, consulted the professor of economics turned career central banker, Mervyn King.  This is not mere student politics, this is the trillion dollar question of the moment.  Mervyn confirmed that the current tri-partite regulatory regime designed by Balls and Brown “was a mess”.

As if that wasn’t bad enough figures released yesterday showed that Britain has the biggest budget deficit in the world.  The best placed economy to weather the global crisis (© G. Brown) had government borrowing hit £20 billion in May, which means the government is overspending by nearly £30 million an hour. Gordon is spending way beyond our means and putting our children into debt at an unheard of rate.  He actually boasts that he is going to spend, spend, spend…

Mervyn basically testified yesterday that the government needed to cut spending much more dramatically than it is planning to do or else we will be ruined.  If Gordon is hoping for a recovery (as Alastair officially predicts) to save him in time for a general election the news from the OECD will not be encouraging.  The OECD said yesterday that Britain is in “severe recession” and that it was downgrading it’s expectations for the UK economy, predicting it will shrink by 4.3% this year…

Here is the futures price chart for the generic Gilt.  All that is stopping that chart going further south faster is that the Bank of England is printing money (though printing isn’t the way it done nowadays, the Bank just changes amounts in the electronic ledger).  Some of that money is recycled into mopping up gilts.  It won’t work for ever.

Gordon has convinced fellow members of the IMF to sell the fund’s gold reserves, this visibly holds down the gold price as the relative value of paper money is destroyed.   There will be an awful day of reckoning.

The gilt market will revolt sooner or later.   Darling’s fantasy forecasts will be rejected by those of us in the reality-based financial markets.   The numbers are horrific.  Bloomberg’s Andrew MacAskill has totted up the cost of the bailout as £1.4 trillion.  That is over 100% of GDP.

That has worked so well for Britain.  Not.

UPDATE : Guido didn’t see C4 News but a co-conspirator over on HPC reports Mandelson on the subject of IMF bailouts as telling Jon Snow

PM : “We won’t be at the top of the queue”

JS : “You didn’t say we won’t be in the queue”

PM : “I don’t think we will be in the queue”

Honestly he didn’t want to say that last bit. He was more or less forced to. Very sheepish and quiet whan he said it. All this after Mandelson spent a good minute talking about how the stigma of going to the IMF was being reduced and it wouldn’t be embarrassing to go to them now. He even used examples of other countries, Mexico, that were considering using the special drawdown facility. We are being primed. Pure and simple. Just as we were for low interest rates and QE.

Apparently Mandelson said “We are destigmatising going to the IMF”.  Anyone got the video?

A governor of the Bank of England has never had an audience with the Queen before.  King had just told a stunned Westminster that there is no more money for another fiscal splurge.  Perhaps Her Majesty is worried that the currency adorned by her face is being recklessly devalued.  If she next calls in the generals for an audience our unelected, unmandated Prime Minister should really get worried…

Derek Wanless – Gordon Brown’s most trusted banker – who chaired Northern Rock’s audit and risk committees, also has a multi-million pound pension paid for by the taxpayer. Vince Cable railed at the “collapse of Northern Rock; a product of greed and reckless gambling by overpaid executives”.

It was Wanless who failed in his responsibility to rein in that reckless gambling.

The government’s holding company, UK Financial Investments Ltd, is the majority shareholder in both RBS and Northern Rock. Based on the pensions data below, the taxpaying public as shareholders are funding a £14 million plus pension for Wanless. Does Brown think his friend Derek Wanless should be so rewarded given his catastrophic failure in his responsibility to exercise oversight of the risk?

Graphic credit : Paul Waugh

*Based on standard 20 x multiple.