THE MASSIVE DEBT THAT GIBRALTAR'S VOTERS MUST FACE

Gibraltar £1 coin

If Gibraltar's massive debt run up by the Caruana government, and much of which has been incurred on grandiose and costly memorials to the Chief Minister's ego -  faced foreclosure tomorrow, we would be as poverty-struck as Greece.

And though Gibraltar's electorate would not break up the paving stones of the Piazza or hurl fireworks or petrol bombs in John Macintosh Square, a horde of angry citizen's would descend on No 6 demanding Peter Caruana's political scalp.
 
Any demand that Gibraltar immediately meet its £480 million gross national debt would force us all to dig deep into our pockets deeper, in fact, than most of us could reach. For, as Opposition Leader Fabian Picardo told Parliament, that debt is equivalent to £24,000 for every voter …and considerably more than the annual pay packet of many of them. And it calls into question the Chief Minister's promises to cut personal taxes.

He is no fool financially. Yet we are assured that the Government's revenues are so sound and the country's books so meticulously balanced that we will all pay less tax instead of more. Can it be that, with a general election looming, the current occupant of No 6 might be tempted to fudge the accounting? Surely not. But few will forget the financial fiasco of the earliest GSD flagship project: the Theatre Royal. And the glass façade of the new airport is a sorry daily reminder of the latest unnecessary spending.
 
Perhaps, after all, he is not so clever an economist as he thinks himself to be.
For the rosy picture of Gibraltar's economy and finances which he painted in his Budget speech is a fake. Or, as Picardo put it:  This cry of success the current Chief Minister makes is simply the call of the smug self satisfaction of the boy who marks his own exam paper and tells the world he has done so well. The long and the short of it is that after three long years of  Take, Take, Take, the public will not be fooled by one year of some give.
 

In Britain during the recent global financial crisis, the government had to step in to bail two of the country's major banks so that the UK taxpayers effectively became their biggest shareholders. There have even been recent suggestions meant seriously though far-fetched that each taxpayer should actually be given shares which he or she could eventually sell, pocketing any difference between the original value of the share and the price at which it was sold.
 
Here, unfortunately for the taxpayer who eventually will have to make good the wastage, it is the Government which needs the bail out and it has no shares to offer the electorate. The currency of trust has vanished.