'Budget 2024: Steal from Starmer, cut common sense, and overspend on hot air'
The man who likes to imagine he's in charge of your money is preparing a big speech about how much of it he'll let you have, and how grateful you should be to him for doing so.
But this is like your bank manager calling you in for a disciplinary chat. How much money you've got depends on your boss, prevailing global economic headwinds, and the current price of oil. This besuited berk has no way to change any of that, and he has as much control of it as you choose to let him have.
He knows this, so he'll give you a good ticking off before promising he can look after your money better. Maybe he'll offer you a pen with the name of the bank on it, or something equally pathetic like a tote bag or a 1p cut in National Insurance, which most of us couldn't notice without a degree in forensic accountancy.
But if you feel this bank has not done what it should, you can always up sticks and move your account somewhere else. And the nation is now at the point where it is looking much more favourably at the mutual building society down the road, so long as it can get its act together.
The only vote for Galloway that ever made a difference was keeping him inside the Big Brother house with Jimmy Savile, doing cat impressionsIt used to be that Budgets had the sort of dramatic import that the pronouncements could disrupt a factory floor, the sixth form common room, or a village planning committee. Taxes going up or down, a penny on cigs or a cut in petrol duty, would have us booking holidays, selling a kidney, or running to the nearest petrol station to be first in the queue either before or after midnight.
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Not any more, though. Because it's just the same old dribble, as predictable and inevitably painful as a being screened for something genital by a resentful, over-worked, under-paid, semi-qualified, trainee almost-medic who would rather be in Australia than up your bum, all things considered.
There's tedious expectation management from the Treasury, kite-flying with lies to trusted journalists for weeks beforehand to see what won't land with a thud, and some politicking rigmarole before a "rabbit from the hat" which makes it look like the Chancellor of the day is a maths genius, as opposed to a bumbling middle-manager with the financial acumen of Ozzy Osbourne in his heyday.
The pinnacle of the genre came under David Cameron, now broadly considered even by Tories as one of the worst Prime Ministers they've ever inflicted on us. He in turn gave us George Osborne, a modern-day Sheriff of Rottingham who systematically dismantled everything useful and worthwhile that was left in the public sector, and allowed those who made off with our water, fuel, energy, railways, telecoms, trains, and Post Office to party like it was 1999. With them, it was all spin, and ever since, spin's all we've had. Which is why you can predict what'll happen in Wednesday's budget all too easily.
"Lie, cheat, steal! We taught you all you know!"1. Jeremy will release photos of him Hard At Work. There'll be something in the photo so expensive it'll made you scream, like gold-plated eyelash curlers or a £1,000 tie.
2. Jeremy will pose for photos with his Treasury team. Unlike the previous Chancellor, he won't have to do it on a staircase so he looks taller, but there is no way for his face to wear any expression other than Surprised Duck.
3. Jeremy will outline a Serious Economic Outlook, in which We Must Pull Together to Build the Britain We/You/They Want.
4. Rejoice! For it's already working! Jeremy and Rishi have personally heaved Britain round the corner, up the hill, onto the sunlit uplands, where Britain Can Stand Tall Once More! Oh, the relief.
5. Oh look, a rabbit. Jeremy will pretend a penny off something will make a vast difference to voters, even though the people it makes the most difference to will be the non-executive directors, landlords, farmers and landowners who sit behind him on the Tory benches who will Hear, Hear until they're slightly more purple than usual.
6. You won't find out what it all costs until about four days later, when everyone's gone through an inch-thick document with a calculator and a more analytical eye than anyone in Parliament seems to possess.
Somewhere along the way he will steal an idea from Labour, which is the principal reason Labour has not told anyone their ideas. There's one long, and one short-term reason for doing this. The first is that it destroys the sums for Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves, and the second is that Tory backbenchers will laugh their socks off and the evening news will make it seem what he's said is popular with everyone else, so it must just be you that thinks it's theft.
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But stealing from Keir Starmer isn't the end of it. Jeremy and Rishi have also stolen from wrongly-convicted ex-postmasters and living and dead victims of the infected blood scandal by stalling on compensation, which even though it's ring-fenced and can't be spent on anything else, can be offset against the spending as long as it sits in a Treasury vault.
He's going to do exactly what that pathetic, overblown bank manager would, and sit on your money which you want to use for good things, while overspending on hot air about his organisation's brilliant ideas and all the fabulous stuff he's done instead - like giving your money to Matt Hancock's pub landlord, for example, or losing billions in the Irish Sea because of a misbegotten Brexit.
And if you are unwise enough to inhale the fumes that get emitted in Parliament on Wednesday, you'll find your common sense has been cut, along with libraries, social services, disability support, green energy subsidies, the NHS, resources for schools, dentist appointments and any chance another sliver of people had of keeping their head above water.
The reason we don't pay attention to the Budget anymore is not just because we know what they'll say. It's because we know what they won't - that there are more people sleeping rough, that it's harder to get by, that A&E is a war zone and if they hadn't cut all the children's services there wouldn't be as many children being knifed by other children.
We don't look at or listen to them, because they're not talking about the world we can see and hear. We ignore the Budget for the same reason we'd ignore the bank manager: because they ignore us, until they can't anymore. And that, Jeremy, is why we're switching just as soon as we can.
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