Stick with us despite the gloom

The title of today's entry is the headline on the BBC News app. It doesn't make for promising reading.


George, Mr Osborne, to us brandished his big red briefcase outside 11 Downing Street today before travelling down the road to parliament to disseminate its contents to the fairly uninterested British Public.

 

Why would it be interested really? The targets the government set themselves have slipped quite dramatically. Growth forecasts for this year have been halved. The national debt is still rising almost 85% of GDP and won't start decreasing until 2018.


It seems the best news is that a 6p beer tax that was planned for the Autumn won't happen. What a load of rubbish this really is. How is this good news? It's a large obvious piece of propaganda. He may as well have announced that a £50 tax on chewing gum will not be going ahead. This 'good news' doesn't save anyone any money. In actual fact the tax on beer has been reduced by 1p. This might save me a couple of quid over the next three years. Cheers Mr Osborne.

Petrol prices are fixed. Great. Fixed at an extraordinarily high value. Again this doesn't save me anything.

Public Service pay increases are capped at 1%. A pay rise of a maximum of £350 on the average wage this is before tax. More pay means more tax. This 1% is below the rate of inflation and so, as the unions argue, it actually equates to a real term decrease in salary.

I for one wish he had left his big red box in his house.

 

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