The Bodge it Budget

The Following is an article I wrote for Student Direct. The online version can be found here.

Alastair Darling’s Budget has destroyed our Generation’s future Prosperity

I listened to Wednesday’s budget announcement with a mixture of boredom, fury and impending doom. We can excuse the chancellor for being boring, given his job he can be excused for not sounding particularly enthusiastic about what he had to announce. But what none of us should want to excuse is the horrible fate that awaits us when we finally step out into the real world and join the workforce.

It’s not that I don’t believe that the chancellor has some good intentions. Nobody goes into politics in order to deliberately do harm to their country. But given the almost systematic manner in which the infrastructure and the public services in this country have been mishandled, we could be forgiven for thinking otherwise. There’s the government debt, rising for the next four years to 79% of GDP; that’s 1.4 Trillion Pounds. Over the next two years the treasury will be borrowing more money than all governments put together since the bank of England was founded more than 300 years ago. It’s a staggering amount of money and it’s us who will be paying this money back.

I feel sorry for those among us who will be leaving university this year. The jobs will be scarce, the competition harsh. And even if jobs can be found, they may be on a part-time or short-term basis. Those of us who have another one or more years to go will find ourselves in equally unenviable positions. Don’t kid yourself; the next few years will be tough. We will undoubtedly have to pay back more out of our wages in taxes and we will receive fewer benefits in return. The last ten years have seen people live above their means; the next ten years will see people suffer as a result. This single matter constitutes the greatest failing of this government, and is probably one of the greatest failings in governmental oversight in our nation’s history.

So what would I want to see changed? I would like to see some realism and some honesty from the government. All this budget did was push the pain further away, like someone taking out a new credit card to avoid paying off their current debts.

We needed the budget to give us the truth, to tell us that yes, there will be pain, but that there’s a way to get through it. This budget didn’t do that, the government closed its eyes and pretended the problem didn’t exist. Life will go on and the public finances will be restored. But it will be a long and painful journey for us all.

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Apologies for the lack of blogging, but exams are upon us. Expect little between now and the AGM.

The press have (finally) caught up

So I posted about government advertising a couple of weeks back?

Well, the Telegraph has started to notice that obscene amounts of money are being wasted.

Messages from the state were relayed to the population via television, radio, cinema, newspapers, magazines and billboards on more than 3.7 million occasions during 2008, according to new research by media analysts at The Nielsen Company.

Which, of course, is outrageous.

So what would we do?

The Conservatives … have set out plans to slash the government’s marketing budget by £250 million to help pay for a freeze in council tax

So next time the government accuses us of getting our priorities wrong, perhaps this is one thing to be flung in their faces….