Nightmare Budget

The little gloss that remained on the New Labour project was stripped away by today's budget. I've always thought Alistair Darling looked like a seagull, and as seagulls are prone to doing, today he has shat all over us.

Apparently, gambling on rapid economic recovery by 2010, he has hiked up taxes on fuel, booze, fags, and upped income tax for high earners to 50%.

The reality: the government forecasts for recovery are utter, utter crap. 3.5% growth by 2011?! Are you kidding me? They must be smoking some good crack.

The government's contention that with enough spending and borrowing, we can pull ourselves out of the downturn in a year, is complete hooey; an example of brainless Keynesian dogma, based on a totally fantastical theory of how an economy actually functions.

For everything that could have been announced in today to improve our situation, the opposite was done. Taxes, spending, borrowing, debt - all significantly up. The borrowing and debt statistics are terrifying.

Borrowing is forecast as £175 billion this year alone; £606 billion over the next four years. This is dire news for already battered sterling. We can look forward to more failed government bond auctions. What happens if our foreign lenders universally decide our credit card is maxed out? I wonder if such an eventuality is all that far away, particularly now that, rather than taking the first tentative steps towards reining in our deficit and closing up the gaping black holes in our public finances, we have instead announced to the world our plans to continue at quickening pace down the slippery slope of national bankruptcy?

UK net debt is forecast to be 59% this year, 68% next year, and rising to 79% by 2013-14. The golden fiscal rules seem a long time ago now, don't they?


These figures are unprecedented and catastrophic, and to see the Gorgon smirking and giggling while David Cameron lambasted him for these very things was a damning indictment of the type of man the Gorgon is: he just doesn't give a shit.

The scariest thing about it all is how woefully inaccurate these governments forecasts nearly always are - normally the reality ends up being much higher.


And so much for axing the beer tax. 2000 pubs closed in the last year, and yet the Seagull hikes up the tax again. You can't even drown your sorrows at the mess of this country without getting financially shafted by the State.

And finally, a big middle finger from the government to anyone who is successful enough to have a salary of over £150,000. If I was earning that much, I think I'd rather gouge out my own eyeballs than, quite literally, directly split it with the government. Just on principle, no one should ever have to give 50% of their income directly to the government - lump indirect and stealth taxation in there, and let me tell you: if a brain drain does indeed take place, I certainly won't be criticising the brains.


Mary Riddell, writing, bizarrely enough, in the Telegraph, lauds the budget's "boldness" and how "redistributive" it is, calling it a "Robin Hood budget."


No Mary - Robin Hood stole from the rich to give to the poor. The State is stealing from the rich to give to the State. This budget is shafting us all, and shafting our children, and shafting our children's children. The very fact that the Seagull has taken a particular interest, this time round, in shafting our most efficient wealth-generators, probably to no benefit in terms of tax revenues - in fact, possibly to its detriment - is proof that the government do not have the interests of the average Brit at heart.

They have the interests of their dogmatic political base at heart - those who bray for the blood of the wealthy and successful, and whose idea of social equality amounts to little more than equality of poverty. There is nothing noble, moral or "fair" about thieving more than half of a man's income to fund a public sector and welfare state so bloated and bureaucratic that it has become almost unrecognisable as a provider of basic services, or to pay for ridiculous, expensive initiatives and schemes dreamt up by morons insulated in the cushy political class which never deliver on their promises - just because said man is wealthier than others.

That the Tories won't just stand up and say this is very sad.

When it's all said and done, I think Labour know they're screwed. They are scorching the earth for Cameron. I think they know that the levels of debt and borrowing as they stand are not sustainable for much more than a year or so - they are just banking on the hope that it doesn't all unravel before the election, so that their defeat will maybe, just maybe, not be the humiliating and utterly crushing defeat we all hope it will be. That's what the 50% tax on top earners was all about - a desperate attempt to consolidate what they have left of a political base - namely a bunch of sad, angry leftwingers who cling to the belief that there is any place left for class war and that class warriors are fit for any purpose than reminding us of an embarrassing, depressing past.

Then Cameron's UnTories will come in - and Labour are praying that they will do exactly what I hope they have the balls not to do, but suspect will be the case ... nothing. At least, nothing significant. They might reverse a couple of things, tinker a little here and there, change the rhetoric a little, and generally seem like a bit of fresh air. But I sincerely doubt, as do Labour, that David Cameron will have the gumption to take any of the drastic action needed to try and set the economy back onto an upwards trajectory, and roll back the stifling state. And, perhaps, by the time they get into power anyway, it may already be too late and the damage will have been done: earth scorched past any chance of relatively fast recovery.

This was the Bugger-it-all Budget. The Shaft-Everyone Budget. The Nightmare Budget.

Will the last one into the poorhouse please turn off the lights? And be careful of the flying seagull shit.