Subject: Budget day.

 

The time ticks down, the red box appears and is transported down the road into the Houses of Parliament as the first female chancellor launches into a long diatribe on the economic sickness that has befallen our country and the cure she proposes to revive it.
It’s been a long while coming and much has been leaked. When I was growing up  budget information was sacrosanct, leak’s could spook the financial market and whilst politicians saw themselves as policy makers it was the Markets movers and shakers who held the power. Today, ‘information leaks’ are expected, all part of the mummification and infantilisation of the nation who have grown weak and unable to understand  the word “taxation” as being a component necessary to pay for the goods and services on which we rely to provide things. The police, the courts, the prisons, the schools and hospital’s, road building and repair  the list goes on but we seem ignorant to the fact that taxation is an integral component to make society work. Taxation is not a ‘punishment’ but a method, like insurance of ensuring that when the time comes you have the money put aside.
One of the strange things in the working of the political system is in the effort to ensure fairness, the people who oppose you are given their time to detract from virtually anything and everything and so immediately the Chancellor resumed her seat the converse arguments as to why she was wrong in her analysis flow and counter flow challenging all her hypothesis and leaving us confused and often resentful.
No one likes the idea of having to part with money you rightfully assume is yours but equally the uproar when prisoners are released early because of a shortage of prison space, or the long wait for an operation, overcrowded schools and undernourished children all fundamentally provided out of taxation but the media and the phalanx of  Influencer’s who, night and day spin their web of controversy, is it any wounder the mental health in the country is dire.