What The Dickens?

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OK, budget week here in Blighty: what do I make of it? Well, I certainly didn't think it was as bad - read indifferent - as most of the pundits who immediately piled in to characterise it as a smudget. The reason I say it was not bad is that we all know from past experience that Labour governments are damned if they do and damned if they don't; and usually inherit a totally poisoned chalice after the exit of the previous Tory government. Blair got a relatively easy ride of it, riding an economic uptick and following a bland Tory outing within the relative safety of an EU cocoon. This time around, Labour have faced the legacy of fourteen years of complete Tory ineptitude, greed, lobbyist self-interest and frankly utter bloody lunacy, culminating in the most febrile half decade in world politics since the Cold War.

To say that the current government has little fabric to work with is understatement on a grandiose scale: they have fuck-all resources to work with in the economic vacuum left by the bunch of halfwits [natural party of government, anyone? Do me a favour] that effectively destroyed our domestic economy in the first place. Throw in a US president that has little to no knowledge of the world and politics and cares even less save with respect to his own family's business interests, and you have effectively geopolitics in a blender. The resulting soup ain't pretty, either. To expect a UK chancellor to come up with a budget that pleases everyone at any time in history, good or bad, is so stupendously naïve as to beggar description, anyway, whatever the circumstances: the tide is always against them by default.

I said when Labour came in that this is not a five year project. Not a ten year project, even. This mess is going to taken a generation to sort out, and the voting public need to have a good measure of faith and a large dollop of patience in the matter. I personally will be dead sooner rather than later and will probably not ever see the benefit of a truly functioning mixed economy, more's the pity. I would have loved to see the postwar UK Welfare State expand and flourish again in my lifetime: to see the world itself attain some semblance of stability and equality. That wish alone is reason enough to live to be a hundred or more. If I ever - unlikely, I know - do reach that age, and we're still then stuck in this death-spiral of human stupidity I think I'm going to be one mortally pissed-off old man and a very malign spectre thereafter with a mission to haunt the bejeezus out of the fuckwits that follow thereafter...

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