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.
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