A Red Box Of Tricks

Despite looking like the put-upon younger brother to children television's Sad Sack, George Osborne has yet again used his faulty calculator to inflict more misery upon the shoulders of Britain's vulnerable today.

The cuts to pensioners' pay and people claiming Child Benefit have been incisive. Personal tax allowance has also been handpicked for extra cruelty. Oh, and lest we forget the NHS? 

Economic commentators have come out to denounce the cumbersome nature of Osborne's chicanery - stating that it outdoes Lawson's gilded scythe which was used with aplomb in the 1980s to set free the dirty rich of Britain.    

The incumbent Treasury are sure to be doing the rounds for the sake of their charm offensive (but certainly not for their guilt). Perhaps some amount of doublespeak will justify the challenges they are facing following the fuck up of the banking sector in 2008. In the May 2010 Election all parties were chasing a burst ball down an economically retarded path. Rather naively Nick Clegg - a career opportunist resplendent with heavily rehearsed hand gestures - saw a position of power rather than the principles his party loosely follow. Politically the UK is in a stalemate whilst the economy - trenchant since the freeing up of the markets thirty years ago - is the all out winner.  

All of this is, then, no surprise. It will continue to be unsurprising. 

Larry Elliott makes the point that the huge tax cuts for the rich in the '80s were serving the purpose of making Britain a holiday island for the world's elite. And it did yield a somewhat Ratner's-lite impression that everyone was independently wealthy enough to gorge themselves on the property boom and own a swanky car at the same time. It failed the decade after, however this is not the point. Lawson, and more importantly the Thatcher government underpinning the Treasury at the time, wanted a free market economy for Britain. The UK have had this and continue to have this now - and look at the mess it's left.

So what of this Budget? What modus operandi has it taken if there is not an ideological catch-all behind it? 

Osborne has taken a bruising, almost molester's approach to Britain's pensioners. In a bygone age when we could pride ourselves on having a community the pensioner was characterised as investing their lot in the building society. They'd worked hard, and like  anything that just wants to rest and rest peacefully, withdrawing a pension from trusted sources would be as natural as holidaying to Dorset once or twice a year. 

Robert Maxwell was the first grim sign in a post-Thatcher era that the businessman could do what he wants under the rules set out by the government. Even pension funds. In late 2007 the television screens were full of disturbing images of pensioners standing in line outside Northern Rock branches worrying what was happening to their investments. The building society garnered the most pity in that situation.

Bankers, businessmen and politicians have with ever greater vindictiveness hit the pensioners the hardest in the last twenty years. Politicians, in particular, are the most rank in their hypocrisy. Often they condemn a broken society, especially when elderly people are abused by yobs in their own home. However, are the politicians not more of a threat to the pensioner than an unhugged Hoodie? A burglar can enter a pensioner's home once, and take whatever is lying about. The politician can get unbridled access to the pensioner's bank account anytime. And do all of this whilst wearing a suit and a set of over prepared hand gestures. 

The reason behind it is simple. I would imagine that the operators in power see the elderly as the froth to be whisked away. They cannot fight back because they're not in the mindset to fight back. They have retired after all. Pensioners are not the go-getting, consumer behemoth that will instigate growth in an often deluded economy. On average a pensioner wouldn't spend great swathes of cash in supermarkets, or on holidays, or on cars, or on houses, or on Smartphones, or on computer games, or on televisions, or on all the trinkets that the Treasury wants you to purchase, so that the multi-nationals can see a point in investing in Britain.

Whatever your take on big companies pumping money into the British economy - an economy which was once doing the pumping in an era most pensioners' fathers and grandfathers can remember - a group within its society invariably has to suffer. And this is the point to it all. An average seventy five year old would have seen traditional industries flounder under the Tories (and Labour) in an era that gave way to American and Far East capitalism. The same seventy five year old would then have to suffer the cuts and robberies from a denationalised economy. The retired worker would then have to worry about what their banks were doing with their savings. 

It's as if the Tories, in a very public fit of vengeance, want to put them all in a home with no windows or fresh air. Osborne is a politician who would be the first to drive them there with a very assured smirk on his face. 

Heavy Military Machinery Is Hovering Overhead

Benjamin Netanjahu is, among other things, a great believer in the tradition of a leap year. 

Nearly four years ago he and his Likud government put it upon themselves to attack the Palestinian territories in Gaza in what was considered by the scarce media pack present a series of megalomaniacal bloody onslaughts. However this was on a people on the ground who literally swapped over the role of the Jews' David not for their own wont.

Events at their very real essence get filtered and distorted by the various satellite stations wanting to keep onside the lobby groups lurking in the director's gantry. It's very much how Chinese whispers start and never seem to end. So with every incident, intentional or otherwise, it's a race to win over the "perception agenda". 

Politically Netanjahu knows that this year is going to be crucial for his hell-mended desire to keep Israel afloat. Last year Palestinian political leaders and its peoples' good will went to the UN to apply for recognition within the international community. Strangely - and conspiratorially one would imagine - nothing has yet come to fruition for the Palestinians' democratic right for statehood. With this in mind Likud, perhaps having a hand in the fate of this move by the Palestinians, would have become masters again on the path of their role in the Middle East. 

However stranger things are happening and insurances are constantly being sought. 

Netanjahu, along with AIPAC, have been lobbying hard again for tougher sanctions and, reading in between the lines, an all-out war against Iran. Whether Mossad have been working overtime lately or not, Likud seem spooked at something. Perhaps Likud are concerned that, what with growing distance in the relationship between Netanjahu and Obama, this next year is crucial for them to get their deck sorted out whilst the cat's away. 

Netanjahu was in Washington last week meeting Obama. They exchanged terse language in what was an uneasy confrontation with the media. Netanjahu was on record saying how Israel is a strong country and should remain that way. Now this is tough talk that belies a deeper, hidden concern that he and his Zionist friends are really following, namely: would Washington abandon us and we would be left arms-less and set adrift?

This is the precise reason why Israel is increasingly striking their enemies when there is a US election year. Likud know that if Obama gets re-election then there is another four years of strained relations and international vilification - especially if Palestinian human rights continue to suffer. However if a GOP candidate gets elected then they can be rest assured that AIPAC will get to them before Netanjahu even boards a chartered jet at Jerusalem International Airport.

Will they want to chance their arms at such a gamble? Hardly. The Gaza onslaught three and a half years ago was when the furniture was being moved about in Washington. There will be military maneuvering this year - you can guarantee it because Israel flexes its muscle when the stronger are weak and when the weak remain the weakest.   

As I write this F-16 pilot fighters - sat in planes they bought from the West - are hovering over Gaza like the chill of yet another unnecessary dawn.