Tuesday 20th March

Don’t you find it depressing when these Annual events come round, it reminds one of the passing years and that one is growing older, and the speed they seem to recur makes it feel as if one is growing older faster and faster too.  And nowadays the Budget is such a stage-managed event; it is more to garner headlines than to make any real difference.  I mean, everyone is talking as if getting rid of, or reducing the 50p tax rate is a done deal; it almost seems pointless waiting for Wednesday’s announcement, it won’t be a surprise now.  But that is the way things are done nowadays, stories and hints are trailed in the press as if they are leaks when in fact they have been planted by the very politicians who exhibit such surprise at their very suggestion.

Whatever Mr. Osborne decides in his wisdom, or more likely as a compromise with the hurt feelings of the LibDems, who are getting the sharp end of the public’s anger whatever they do, let us hope that it can get the economy going again.  The one thing that is sorely missing is Confidence, but that is largely because the wretched Coalition went overboard on Austerity, and the need to reduce the deficit so quickly.  In all probability they may have made it worse, by making everyone so scared that no-one is moving house or buying new cars or going on expensive holidays.  Like a lot of little squirrels we are guarding our dwindling store of nuts, because everyone has been telling us we are in for a very hard winter, lasting several years, and nuts may be hard to find in the future.

And what is it with the Tories that they hate the Public sector so much.  If conditions and pensions are much better in the public sector, then surely any government should be passing legislation to make the private sector as well provided for too.  It is a myth that the Private sector always gets it right, and that the Market will set the right price for everything.  The Market has no conscience, has no brain, cannot see into the future and is not concerned for anyone’s survival but its own.  The Market is not God, and even if it were, it would only go to prove that God can be a nasty-minded little so-and-so at times.

Politics is a pendulum, which each party tries to swing one way or the other, only time will tell if it has swung too far in one direction too quickly or still has further to go.  Tick Tock.