Information Landmine

"The Americans keep telling us how successful their system is. Then they remind us not to stray too far from our hotel at night." - An un-named EU trade representative quoted during international trade talks in Denver, Colorado, 1997.

Monday, June 28, 2010

Can we stop this government now? I want to get off!

Lib Dem voters aren't too keen on the VAT rise it would seem and are regretting the way they voted as a result.

How is this possibly news? Or even sensible research? Who is keen on the VAT rise? (Apart from Alexander/Cameron/Clegg/Osborne?)

Bloody hell Lib Dem members, it's not the rise in VAT you should be getting your knickers in a twist over... it's the way your mate Clegg is changing the whole political underpinnings of your party that are the problem.

Him and his new buddies have just given us a budget that hits the poor six times more than the rest. It's knocked some of the most sensible and useful initiatives on the head, like the frankly wonderful Future Jobs Fund, cut University places, oh and if you have more than one baby and you're not married then there will be some nice little tax related penalties for you... (assuming you have a job and are paying tax).

That is what you should be getting upset about. It should be making you so angry that you cry, giving you sleepless nights and forcing you to drink (not affected by tax increases - they missed a trick there).

Because you see, when you're told that the Lib Dems have injected some fairness into the budget, they're not lying to you. It's just they use the Tory definition of fairness now (it's not the kind of fairness that is concerned with inequality and injustice, it's the kind of fairness that keeps the rich OK and barely affected and screws the undeserving poor [1]). This isn't a coalition government, it's a Tory government with a few trophy try hard ministers to keep the intellectual liberals up in their ivory towers.

The solution? I waver on this every day. In the absence of being able to run away, today's plan is

(a) Join the Labour Party
(b) Vote in Ed Miliband [2]
(c) Get on with sorting this fucking mess out (probably via Big Society - i.e. do for free what Cameron can't be arsed to pay for anymore)
(d) Have another drink and wait for the results of the comprehensive spending review which will no doubt screw us over even more.

[1] The more I look at the budget, the more I conclude that they could have saved a whole load of trouble for themselves by just rounding up all the 'poor' people and shooting them.

[2] Yes, Ed is my candidate of choice, it's the beer belly. It makes him seem some how more real... although I did like this of David's.

2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Unfortunately they didn't miss a trick. The rise in VAT from next January will also affect alcohol. To add to your excellent piece, the increase in capital gains tax - which mainly affects the rich with assets - was a lot lower than expected and a reduction of 1% in corporate tax is just insulting, even to the businesses it's supposedly meant to attract.

Rob

28 June, 2010 22:49  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"... it's the kind of fairness that keeps the rich OK ..."

Should get a big thumbs up from Uncle Petie's family then.

07 July, 2010 23:17  

Post a Comment

<< Home

Support the Open Rights Group Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.5 License.