Douglas Carswell's Blog

A bailout is a loan, concludes Guardian expert

According to Guardian writer, Lisa O'Carroll, "Ireland's "bailout" isn't a bailout at all.  It's a great big loan ..."

What else, apart from a "a great big loan", do you suppose Lisa thought a bailout could otherwise be?  Listening to the BBC-types reporting on bailouts over the past year, you could be forgiven for supposing that they were some form of debt reduction or forgiveness, rather than an increase in the amount owed.  

So keen is Lisa O'Carroll to attack me ("... Carswell should go back to school..."), she seems to have overlooked the way in which these "great big loans" will merely increase the amount of money Ireland owes.   

Setting aside her snide, personal remarks, Lisa's main point seems to be that British taxpayers should relax in the knowledge that they'll be making a tidy profit from this "great big loan" to Ireland.  Britain will, apparently, be borrowing the money we will then lend onto Ireland at a lower rate of interest than we will be charging Dublin. 

How, Lisa, does pressing a high interest loan onto an indebted friend help them?

And if many people besides Guardian writers believed that lending to Ireland could be such a profitable enterprise, Ireland would not be needing this "great big loan" in the first place.

UPDATE: Lisa O'Carroll has responded to this post on her blog saying that I've failed to "address the point that viewers of Newsnight listening to his analysis would have thought the UK taxpayer was paying 2p in income tax for the bailouts". 

I didn't address it because the only person listening to Newsnight who seems to think that that is what I said is Lisa O'Carroll.

On Newsnight, I said that " .... the government has ... been increasing our contingent liability to bailing out the eurozone by something like £21bn.  To put that in context that's 2p in the pound income tax." 

For the benefit of Guardian writers intent on misinterpretation, that means that the amount of money involved is big - like their "great big loans".  Indeed, so big that it is not dissimilar in size to the kind of sum that would be yeilded by adding 2p to the basic rate of income tax.  

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