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!

The President Arrives

People often ask me what Government ministers do when they are not legislating, opening new rubbish dumps and watching pay-per-view pornography. Actually, I think the great scandal of the week – Jacqui Smith's husband's theft of the princely sum of £10.00 of public money for the purposes of entertaining himself while the missus was away – has been a little unfair. My nephew, Harry, who works for the Labour Party as an adviser, explained to me that it had simply been an oversight – Jacqui accidentally claimed for the TV bit of her bill instead of just the internet bit. Harry says that if Richard Timney, or Dick as Jacqui calls him, had got his porn online like everyone else then there wouldn't have been a problem!


As to what Ministers do when they are not doing any of the above, they attend international conferences. This provides numerous opportunities for meeting new people, drinking expensive wine and pretending to be important. This last is more easily achieved if you can convince crowds of protesters to turn up and wave banners at you. One of these events is due to happen this week in London, and Barak Obama will be coming to tell every one else what to do about the financial crisis. We will let him do this because he is not George W Bush. He will fly into Stanstead on the Presidential Aeroplane Air Force One, then on to London in the Presidential Helicopter Marine One, where he will have his lunch of the Presidential Dinner Plate Catering Corps One. Amongst his entourage will be a dedicated medical team and a supply of Presidential blood, in case he should be a victim of an assassination attempt. In the interests of saving money in these straightened times, any innocent bystanders injured in any such incident will be allowed to bleed to death. This is all in stark contrast to Gordon Brown, who has been travelling on his 'pre-G20 world tour' with nothing more than a crack team of eighty three PR men charged with trying to think up stories to distract everyone from his total lack of impact on anybody. He has been doing everything else himself and in he event that anyone thinks he is important enough to try to assassinate he will perform his own life-saving surgery with his home-made needle and thread. I shouldn't think he has too much to worry about, though, as all of the world's nutcases are too busy trying to find Fred Goodwin so they can bring about the end of capitalism and the emancipation of the world's oppressed by smashing his car window.

Incidentally, I understand that there is no truth in the rumour that Obama was initially reluctant to attend the conference and was finally persuaded only when offered the opportunity of a private meeting with Jonathan Ross to discuss ways of offending vulnerable people while broadcasting to the nation.