Member-only story
A Plague On All Your Houses!
They’ve all got their heads up their backsides
It goes like this, before January of next year, the law requires a General Election to be held in the UK. Those of us who can be arsed to vote will be expected to choose from the list of candidates on the local ballot papers, each either representing a political party or standing as an Independent. The problem being, which specific bunch of big-headed, narcissistic, criminal-minded arseholes will be the least problematic, or make the least mess of things!
The current Conservative government has been in office since 2019. It was elected when Boris Johnson was leader. Boris stepped down in 2022, to be succeeded by Liz Truss. Liz nearly managed to crash the economy, scared the banks and Stock Exchange out of a years’ growth and was Prime Minister when the late Queen died. She resigned after fifty days and our current PM — Rishi Sunak — took over. Thus we have had two Prime Ministers foisted on us without the option of voting for them, which makes a number of people quite cross.
The Conservatives have been languishing in the polls for almost their entire term of office, and are panicking about it. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Right Honourable Mr Jeremy Hunt, MP, is due to set out the Budget shortly, and is under all kinds of pressure. All the independent experts are saying that he needs to be prudent and save money. On the other hand Conservative back-benchers are screaming at him to cut taxes in order to win votes. So Mr Hunt is in the unenviable position of trying to find £9bn in cuts to already underfunded public expenditure in order to fund either a small cut in Income Tax, a small reduction in National Insurance payments, or a slight rise in tax thresholds. Whatever he does, of course, somebody will kick off about it, loudly, so he can’t win. Serves him right for being a Tory bastard!
Not that tax cuts are going to help much anyway. The British public are not so dense as to be unaware that any tax cuts will benefit the rich far more than they will the poor. A cut in National Insurance does not bode well for our already-besieged NHS and is a threat to the State Pension, triple lock or no. Also, after months of runaway inflation and years of minimal pay rises, they don’t want their taxes cut by 2%, they want their…
