Budget Day tomorrow and if the speculation is right, it is going to be a mixed bag.
The good news is personal allowance, the amount we earn before paying tax, will be increased by around £600 to £7,475, £250m is being set aside to help first-time home buyers purchase newly built property and a planned rise in fuel duty will be scrapped.
With VAT up to 20%, inflation at 4.4% and the prices of utilities, food, fuel and clothes rising while pay not going up go up by anything like the same extent, it's not expected to be a vintage belt tightening budget because Osbourne doesn't really have anything left to squeeze the masses for.
I like his idea of merging National Insurance (12%) and income tax (20%) because it was time the National Insurance sham was abolished since it's nothing more than just another tax which the Government manipulate so they can keep their promise of not raising income tax. If he sets it at anything other than 32% for the lowest earners though there will be outrage.
Overall, he can't do very much except tinker around the edges and hit the smokers and drinkers which is par for the course on Budget Day. With unemployment soaring and the public sector already being ripped to shreds, he has no room for manoeuvre in that direction and it will not be easy to justify more cuts to save money when his party has just taken us into another war where we are dropping £1 million a pop cruise missiles on Libya.
There is a massive demonstration planned for Saturday against this Governments cuts and students fees and unless Osbourne can pull a rabbit out of his hat tomorrow which will improve the general lot of the majority of households in this country, or hit the well off harder so they pull their weight in his 'all in it together' mantra, there will be much anger on the streets
It's about time we saw some benefits to these austerity measures because so far Osbourne has done nothing but take and offered no carrots while we seem to be in the same position as we were when he took over and that position is the sound of deckchairs being rearranged as the iceberg looms ahead.
3 comments:
I've been sensing a definite weakening in the 'social contract' lately. That's the arrangement described by Hobbes/Locke/Rousseau et al, whereby we agree to let the government organise certain things for us in return for not rising up and seizing power for ourselves.
I blame all this 'belt-tightening' that most of us are having to do, in order to pay for mistakes made by people who are conspicuously not having to do any of the aforementioned tightening of their belts.
Watching our armed forces piss all our money away on fools' errands in the Middle East doesn't exactly help matters either.
Ergo: I think it'll kick off on the weekend, big-time.
There does seem to be much anger about what the Government is doing, mostly directed at the Lib Dems because people seemed to expect the Tories to be evil.
Will be interesting this weekend especially if it is a good mix of public servants and students. Will be looking forward to see how the police treat fellow police officers, teachers, librarians and civil servants as well as the students. Not sure they will be kettling them this time. I have heard talk about it being a larger turnout than for the Iraq war demonstration.
I think they might kettle some of them on Saturday, but there will be some independent watchdogs on the case from Liberty (including a couple of them embedded in the Met) trying to make sure that the wrong people don't get caught up in them. Not entirely sure how they'll do this, but that's the stated intention.
The House of Lords/UK Supreme Court has not found kettling to be unlawful per se, so long as it is used only after other methods of crowd control have been tried, and it is used proportionately and for no longer than absolutely necessary.
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