The little red briefcase of doom

Afternoon campers, let me point something out before I continue. I know sod all about politics. This is my viewpoint of what is going on at the moment and is based on absolutley no facts whatsoever, mainly because I can’t be bothered to go find any - therefore, i think this is very accurate account of the matter in hand how Joe Public sees it.

So then, Alistair Darling has shown everyone his little red briefcase for the first time and then explained away how the government are going to bleed us dry for the foreseeable future - no change from any previous budget then.

Much noise was made about the alcohol issue - and quite rightly so. Tax on alcohol has been put up by more than the rate of inflation. Many will argue this is to hit out at “binge drinking” and “yob culture” and what not - and I agree, although not fully. If it is, it’s disgraceful. I can go out of a weekend and I am perfectly capable to get “a little bit worse for wear” and I am still able to behave myself and not mug/rape/murder anybody, so why should I have to suffer because of some ferrel spawn that are incapable of behaving in a civilised manner at all - let alone after a sniff of the barmaids apron. Even then, I’m still paying for it as I suspect that those cans of cider or whatever they are drinking were paid with out of money they got for signing on as they are unable to work due to a “bad back”.

I also see this fuel tax has been delayed. That is as transparent as I don’t know what. By the time it rolls round to putting this 2p on a litre of petrol, everyone will have forgotten about it so 4p will get slapped on. Remember just after the major petrol blockades a few years back? Petrol went down to about 65p a litre. Granted, it was a nuisance during the protests, queueing for an hour to put a tenner in your tank but still, we reaped the benefits afterwards. I think something serious needs to be done in regards to petrol prices. It is just ridiculous now.

The thing that really really made me guffaw about this budget though was making supermarkets charge for plastic carrier bags. That is possibly the most idiotic idea in the history of bad ideas (apart from the 39th game abroad, obviously). All these do gooder eco-mentalists out there have worked themselves up into a tizz and are convinced that unless we all take to the streets and set our cars on fire, demolish all our houses and start living in trees, the world is going to explode at some point in the next 12 minutes. What absolute twaddle. Yes, the world is going to die a slow and horrible death, but not for the next umpteen million years! We’ll have wiped ourselves out in a global war way before then so stop stressing and thinking up stupid ideas that aren’t going to save the planet!

Anyway, to sum it up in a short and sharp fashion, taxes are going up and up and up and up. Wages are staying where they are. No wonder people are always are - to coin a phrase - “in the shit” financially. I would like to buy my first house soon. I’ve worked out that if I save £200 a month, then by the time I am 756 years of age, i’ll just be able to afford the deposit to buy a 8 person tent (check out the political correctness there. We all know it’s an 8 man tent really). I will then have to work 9000 hours a week to afford the mortgage repayments. But as long as Mr Brown and co have their nice hefty Christmas bonus and expenses bill that stretches from here to the moon and back 27 times, I’ll feel a warm sense of gratification that all my hard work is not going to waste *sigh*