Its been a funny old day for politics.
We are still picking over yesterday's budget from George Osborne. And then yesterday evening we had the Bingo and Beer advert from the Conservatives. I spotted it on Twitter and assumed it was a spoof. I believe it was released by Grant Shapps, but I could be wrong.... The truly insulting thing about it is that they say "Giving hard working people more of what
THEY enjoy !", thereby admitting that they are not "One of Us"
but also admitting they are not "Hard Working" !! They had also produced another whole series of infographic style ads illustrating to us plebs and illiterates what the budget could mean for us !
It makes you realise how close we have now come to realising the nightmare scenario that
George Orwell warned about in his classic novel
1984 : "Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbors, films, football, beer, and above all, gambling filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult…. All that was required of them was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary to make them accept longer working hours or shorter rations. And when they become discontented, as they sometimes did, their discontentment led nowhere, because being without general ideas, they could only focus it on petty specific grievances."
The
pension reform seems to be a good move. At least freeing up those with private pensions to have some more freedom over where their money can go rather than having to buy an Annuity. But no doubt the finance firms will already be re-manoeuvring to find other ways to take our money from us !
They have raised the
personal tax allowance by £500, this does not help those paid less than that but it does still also help those on very high salaries as all tax payers will benefit from that. And I also heard on the radio that it will not help those where their benefits will shift to off-set that. Again, if someone can explain this further, can you please email so I can modify this.
And for
Scotland there seemed to be some breadcrumbs thrown in the form of some tax benefit for the
whisky industry.
But overall, the budget seemed to be not great for the ordinary person and again more advantages for the very well off, with a further advantage for those who can save £15,000 a year !
And unfortunately, Labour appeared to be unable to make any sort of response worthy of a strong opposition.
So that was the Budget 2014 - the
year of Beer and Bingo !
It does feel rather like Tony Benn warned about, where the people never get the politics they deserve and rather the two parties of the two party state just transfer power backwards and forwards between them.
And then to
Scottish politics !
On the radio this evening I heard Ruth Davison, head of the Scottish Conservative party, asking Alex Salmond to explain why the oil revenue figures were so much less than predicted in the White Paper. He avoided giving a straight answer.
I do wonder if pressure hasn't been put on the oil companies to shift as much profit etc into other financial years etc so that this year's figures would appear worse than usual. But as yet I haven't had time to investigate further. There is one reference here :
http://www.ifs.org.uk/publications/7124 and more ....
http://www.ifs.org.uk/publications/7131 A lot of reading there !!
