It's time to panic!

Disaster! The recession has finally hit home in Britain and the nation is united in its sympathy for the greatest victims of them all – the billionaires. The Sunday Times have revealed that those poor people have lost £155 billion between them, so you can see why they are so annoyed at having to pay higher income tax. I'm told that one, Peter Hargraves, who made his money and, no doubt, his own personal contribution to the bankrupting of the British economy, as a fund manager in the City during the boom, has threatened to go and live in the Isle of Man to avoid his new tax bill. Protesters are reported to be rioting on the streets of Douglass as I write. There is no truth in the rumour that a disabled former soldier has been running the London Marathon to raise the money to buy him his ticket.

On a lighter note, the Budget! I have discovered why Alistair Darlings growth projections and GDP forecasts were so far off what everyone else said. It seems that he has been using the wrong type of tea – when one is trying to predict the future, one should use darjeeling and not tetley.

The Budget Explained

That nice young chap Alistair Darling has delivered his Budget, managing to do so while keeping a straight face which was quite impressive. Well, drawing on my own extensive experience of such announcements, I offer my translation of what he had to say....

“We will introduce a new 50% top rate of tax for people who earn £150,000 a year”......this is a clever move to get gullible journalists to write headlines like this, this and this which say that only the rich will pay for the ghastly amount of borrowing that we're announcing. No one will notice that it will only raise a teensy fraction of the money needed and that the poor will pay all the rest...at least not until after the election. I personally am not worried about this, incidentally. Anyone who is stupid enough not to take their money in stocks so that they don't have to pay any income tax at all doesn't deserve 150 grand a year!

“All under 25s who have been out of work for a year will be offered a job or training”.....We'll bung them on a course where they'll get a worthless NVQ. Hopefully this will be so unattractive that they'll claim disability and that'll get them off the jobless statistics.

“You can't cut your way out of a recession!”....We're going to try to scare everyone into thinking that the Tories will close their local hospital to save money. We'll cut spending to ribbons but only after the election.

“Alcohol duty will rise by 2%”....Drunks won't notice

“Duty on tobacco will rise by 2%”....Smokers won't be able to help themselves.

“Fuel Duty will rise by 2%”.....if you say it quickly no-one will notice that this will actually raise as is supposed to be raised by that new tax on the rich.

“The annual ISA limit will increase from £7,200 to £10,200”.....no-one has that much money in the bank anymore anyway

“The economy will grow at 1.5% in 2010 and over 3% per year after that”.....It won't

“The Budget deficit will be £175billion this year”.....You're f***ed, we're f***ed, everyone is f***ing f***ed.

I also notice that the Treasury have had a great new idea for how to keep bankers off the dole queue. They will now be modestly remunerated for selling all the extra government debt which is necessary to bale out those selfsame bankers. And so the circle of life is complete.

Gordon Saves the Day...Again!

It has been a reassuring week. The G20 summit didn't actually achieve anything, of course, but it's nice to know that a big show with enormously rich and important people slapping each other on the back and annoying the Queen is still enough to distract everyone from the important matters of the day! The Security operation surrounding the Summit cost £7million – about enough to pay Jackie Smith's expenses for almost three months – and amounts to a valuable fiscal stimulus for the red carpet industry.

The circus then decamped to Strasbourg for the NATO summit, which welcomed the military giants of Albania to the alliance and at which Barak Obama demonstrated the American's new secret weapon which is based on the Vulcan death-grip – you can see the demonstration in the picture above. The Albanians were, I hear, very impressed.

And there was exciting news from the European Space programme in its continuing efforts to catch up with the North Koreans. They will be attempting to find new planets using the European Extremely Large Telescope – I hear that they were up all night trying to think of a name. The telescope will feature a mirror the size of five buses. British scientists are, as always, keen to participate, and have offered to provide the buses so that the others can measure the device!