down the plughole

If George Osborn wasn’t such an unlovable unmoveable wet fish we would feel sorry for him today as he rises in the House of Commons to deliver his 4^th  budget speech (lets ignore all the other rubbish financial statements he has made in the past 3 years!)

[sorry someone loves him; he is married with 2 children].

In Osborne’s first Budget Speech ‘emergency’ (22 June 2011) there was a pledge to balance the books  by 2016 – fat chance of that now, despite or because of his Vat hike, family tax credit cuts, child benefit raids, tax relief for the rich, and uncountable other austerity measures he has introduced since then, which have killed all growth (Infanticide) , smashed tax revenues, and driven up the deficit every month this year (it is difficult to spot the trick of the illusionist when he claims that the deficit has been reduced by a quarter – but all will be revealed shortly no doubt!)

He is NOT between a rock and a hard place, as the saying goes – he is simply stuffed. There is NOTHING he can do today to make a difference to the British economy – he has blown it. The problem was that he knew nothing about national or any other kind of economics when he started and he knows nothing now. He knew at the outset that the UK had a deficit problem as it was public knowledge before the last election, and that he as Chancellor is in place to find a solution – so he read some books and thought ‘oh I can use the Canadian solution – cut the public sector and let the private sector fill the vacuum’; WRONG. Different circumstances! He has no PlanB and is now a busted flush.

Osborne & Cameron have gone down a dead-end road for 3 years, but daren’t turn back – it would be personal political suicide. Boris Johnson has made it clear that he is waiting in the wings to take over from Cameron asap. Osborne  now has zero confidence of any group of experts or even economic morons and is only still there because he is conjoined to Cameron – he could well be the catalyst that forces the Tories to ditch Cameron before the next election. Both Conservative and LibDem MPs know that their days are numbered and many of them will be out at the next election in summer 2015 – but MPs have a wonderful golden goodby set of benefits (no chance of austerity benefits impacting those then).

Don’t bother to watch the TV or listen to the Radio, today, or buy a newspaper in the Thursday morning – there are no surprises in the budget. No good news, no dad news. Just another attempted fudge and another pack of lies about the financial health of the nation being in recovery. What else can Osborne do?

Most of any new measures proposed this afternoon will be cosmetically timed to be effective AFTER this government lose the next election, but you can still expect something to divert public attention – like screwing up something really big that is still most generally considered worthwhile in Britain today (perhaps raising money by privatisation of the BBC, or disestablishment of the Church of England, or new legislation on Budget Airlines to prevent them increasing operations and reducing prices to the masses?).

If you have a dream get it over with before Osborne rises to his feet and has a slurp of water (or perhaps alcohol this time to take a rub of luck from an earlier ‘successful’ Chancellor Kenneth Clarke who used to sip a dram of whisky?)