Budge over?

Apparently, there’s been a budget. Lots on Twitter about it yesterday and all sorts of conclusions drawn, among the wildest of them being some kind of eugenics programme introduced via the curtailing of child-related benefits for future recipients. I actually saw the word ‘genocide’ being used at one point. Now, it’s probably my insufficiently mature, non-left brain mass, but I don’t think that not paying you for something you have the absolute choice to do or not to do is quite the same as forcibly plucking your mewling infant from the teat and dashing its brains out on the floor. Nor is it as extreme as, say, the kind of screening and sterilisation project I’d heartily favour to quickly rid of us of the human vermin who bob around the murky waters of the underclass.

Sod the “Who’s going to pay for your pension?” argument; bring on the robots I say. We should be clever enough by now to work less, not more and be educated well enough that we can use our non-working time profitably; and not just in the consumption of lowest-common-denominator, audio-visual Soma™ but the kind of life-enhancing projects that visionaries like William Morris dreamed up in the post-industrial, post-government utopia he longed to see. Okay, he was a card-carrying revolutionary socialist and arch nutter but he did knock up a nice wallpaper.

The budget brought forth the usual partisan jeers and cat-calls with the broadly right trumpeting the bold moves to curb the state and the left wringing their caps and rending their garments in agony. The brutes! They cried, painting Hogarthian imaginings of desperate, filthy hordes with comedy teeth roaming the excrement-laden, cobbled streets of Rundown Town, their ragged dozens of children clinging to mother’s sick-stained apron while random non-attached, drink-addled, feral male brutes beat every brat in the vague possibility it might be one of their own. I swear the likes of Owen Jones would actually prefer to see this than the reality of… well, of not very much really.

Because when all’s said and done the budget is very much a sideshow to the far more important business of getting on with it. When beer was a shilling a pint, cutting a penny off the price might have raised many a glass to the Chancellor of a Friday night. But last year’s penny off meant you’d have to drink around 300 pints to get a ‘free’ one, which is probably why he didn’t bother this time round. For all that the professional analysts are calling this ‘far-reaching’, ‘game-changing’ and a ‘new-settlement’ and for all that it wrong-foots Labour’s increasingly slippery purchase on reality, it’s just another tiny bump in the road.

Relax, it's only beer money...

If your living is so marginal that a national budget pushes you over the edge then you do actually deserve all the help you can get, but the mundane truth for most of us is that while it might, or might not occasion a change in some voluntary behaviours, it isn’t really any more significant than that. As for the fear, bring it on. If the left’s bell-ringing alarums are frightening enough people to think twice before having kids; or persuading them to quit drinking, get a job and resolve never to be dependent on the state for a living then job done. Sadly, when it came down to it, the best Labour could manage in response was “That was our idea!” and “Yeah, okay, we’ll give you that.” Cheers, George! 

Budget Buggery!

Much talk over the last few days about the prospect of the Chancellor as an out-of-season Santa, giving away the goodies in exchange for votes. And it will work. Whoever is favoured in todays’ budget, however meagrely, will think just a little more kindly of the current administration. Of course there will also be the detractors and Ed Balls will magic up his own version of prizes for all in response, claiming that somehow Labour, who are largely and repeatedly responsible for the hideous debt burden the nation carries, have a solution to provide prosperity and equality for all. And it’s all bollocks; all of it.

We are simply bust. The fact that our national debt has doubled in the last five years is not ameliorated by the knowledge that it would almost certainly have tripled under Labour. Debt/deficit, the difference is simple enough, yet the ‘great’ British public, who are less numerate than they are literate are either too stupid to get it, or too stupefied by sheer terror to contemplate it. Because it’s like this: Imagine you buy a house for £200,000 on a 90% mortgage that costs you every penny you have left after eating and shortly thereafter you lose your job but manage to blag a mortgage top up of £20k to tide you over. But you can’t get a job that pays what you used to earn… and the value of your house falls to £150,000.

You don’t want to sell it and even if you could you’d still owe £50,000 but after a few months you realise you have no choice, bite the bullet, take the shitty job, rent a studio hovel and accept you’ll never own a home again and undertake to repay your outstanding debt at £3,000 a year for 30 years and hope the interest rates stay low. You can’t save, you have no pension plan and short of winning the lottery all that lies between you and the gutter is sucking up to your crappy boss and praying he doesn’t go bust himself. In short, for many people, it’s all a bit grim and likely to stay that way for some time. You just have to suck it up and carry on.

How do you prefer being cut?

No gimmicks, said George Osborne, so why the gimmick of Inheritance Tax reform which affects nobody without significant assets? Why persist with a Minimum Wage strategy that has ended up being a wage ceiling, rather than a floor? Why not, instead of just talking about ‘austerity’, actually start to implement it? And why not, above all, instead of trying to do a Tommy Cooper and pull a comedy rabbit from a battered old top hat, just tell the truth; we’re still broke and the odd little morsel of under-nourishment is going to do little to change that. It’s about time the government did what a hell of a lot of people are already doing and have done before. Why can’t we all just ‘be British’ about it?

Proper Propaganda

I don’t go out of my way to upset people, really I don’t. I just tell it how I see it and let them make up their own minds. I lose quite a few followers that way but I’ve always reasoned it doesn’t matter; it’s their loss. So, I leave the blog for a few days and what do I find on my return? A right bloody political palaver, that’s what.

We have a coalition ‘government’ (for want of a better word) at the moment, in case you hadn’t noticed. I ask whether you’ve noticed because it’s important. Any form of leadership needs to have at the very least a teensy, tiny bit of a clue where it wishes to venture in the mighty ship of state. Where would be the navigators of one of Her Majesty’s sleek, grey messengers of death if they were all working from different charts?

So what in the name of Clusterfucks Incorporated is going on when, fresh from his paper round, The Boy Clegg demands we steal more from the rich a proposal which then has to be roundly slapped down by George Osborne, the bloke with his actual hands on the purse strings. Who is steering this bloody thing? Does anybody know?

We will never understand the politics of common consent in this country – what we used to imagine was democracy - because we’re free to believe what we want, yet remarkably ill-equipped to tell fact from fiction. I used to think that if politicians just told the truth we’d all make intelligent decisions and vote for the party with the best policies. Think again.

Take Al Murray and his successful Pub Landlord character. This was supposed to be a beautiful bit of British fun-poking at the bigotries of the little Englander, but just as Johnny Speight learned many years before, the great bigoted British public sided largely with the Alf Garnet character. We have travelled nowhere… although Al must have done very nicely out of it. 

It has sod-all to do with policy and nothing whatsoever to do with truth.

prop·a·gan·da/ˌpräpəˈgandə/
   Noun

1. Information, esp. of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote or publicise a particular political   cause or point of view. 
2. The dissemination of such information as a political strategy.

The Left have won the propaganda war, fought on party battle lines drawn up over half a century ago, because now those on the right – especially those IN the right – dare not even pop a pate above the parapet for fear of having it blown clean off. The current government don’t yet seem to have thoroughly grasped that whatever the solution is (and no economist knows) you have to be in office to achieve it. And the last thing you need is a divided front.

The game might yet have been winnable, but then along came Tim – I make millions out of your gullibility – Yeo, to blow the entire ship out of the water. With his dirty thumb in as many pies as the Commons Energy and Climate Change Committee can bake, he is the very epitome of the mostly fictional Nasty Tory Fairy Story the left have promulgated so well.
 

So, well done Tim. One can only conclude that your future fortunes lie in a victory for the other side. You arrogant, cheating, swindling twat.

Nursery Crimes

Many nursery rhymes are said to be partly political in origin. With this in mind I bring you important new updates:

Georgie Porgie, put VAT on a Pie…

Herman Van Rompuy sat on a wall;
Rumpy-Pumpy had a great fall.
All the King's horses and all the King's men,

Couldn't put Herman together again, because Federal Europe allows no royalty and somebody has to consider the human rights of the horses.

Three blind mice, three blind mice,
See how they run!
They can clearly get by without disability living allowance.

Baa, baa, black sheep, Oh... [<~~ link]

Jack and Jill went up the hill,
To fetch a pail of water;
Jack fell down and broke his crown,
And Jill lived happily ever after on the punitive award for damages.

Frere Jacques, got your knackers,
Merkel too, Herman who?
Have a referendum, have a referendum?

A vote for you, a vote for you...

(Now, do it again and this time give the right answer!)

Repeat this one out loud in your best French accent until you get it!

(Answers in a comment)

Un petit, d’un petit

Ça t’en â valle

Un petit d’un petit

A d’agrètte falle

(Geddit?)

Have a lovely weekend!

The VAT in the Hat

Today, for the hard of thinking... I bring you a story in pictures! For those hard of 'picturing' there's a text-only version here: LINK

Black Wednesday

With apologies to Lewis Carroll, I done a pome!

T'was Wedders, and the slimy coves
Did tax and gamble with my pay.

All flimsy were the proffered oaths,

Not to give it all away. 

"Beware the Treasury, my son!

The jaws that bite, the clause that catch!

Beware the Osborne bird, and shun

The furious Moneysnatch!" 

With ill intent he counts his take 

And gives it to the harpie who, 

Without a care how much I make, 

Breeds fifteen children in a shoe. 

Calloo callay it’s Budget Day 

And all my money's gone away. 

Now, by law, the gov’ment will 

Take my dosh to pay their bills 

Fee fi fo fum... 

There goes the home of an English man.

(With thanks to Messrs Brown and Co, for spending all my fucking dough!)