Not now...

Trying to get my head around some of the crap logic in yesterday's budget. The chancellor, on the wireless and everywhere else, justified the increased taxes on alcoholic drinks and tobacco by saying they would discourage binge drinking and also help people give up smoking. In the same breath he says that these rises have enabled him to fund the increase in cold weather payments for the elderly.

Riiiiiiiight. Run that by me again. You bang taxes up under the smokescreen that it's ostensibly good for us all because people will buy less of the societally* damaging booze and health damaging baccy. But if this works, your income then decreases. So how does a reduced income fund a rise? Errr...No. It doesn't work. In fact, like all politicians, you're a two-faced cnut. You know folk won't give these up so you make a token yet totally ineffectual nod towards social responsibility and make the increases affordable. 11p on fags instead of £1? No, those health platitudes count for nothing, you don't want people to give up but they might just cut down a bit and the 11p covers that. Then you punish poor sods like me, who like the odd pint now and then but are able to get home without getting into a fight or throwing up, by putting 4p on a pint. Kids don't drink Ol' Fester's Bowel Wrench, they like bottles of pretty coloured water containing rubbing alcohol and cans of cheap cider (as long as the name of the cider contains any two of the words "iced", "white", diamond" or "lightning". There's even a cheap one called "Ace", presumably an industry in-joke that has passed the legislators by. Indeed ).

To cap it all, you increase child benefit on the premise that it will help lift more children out of poverty. Noble. Call me cynical but somehow I just can't see the extra couple of quid a week going on fair trade organic lentils when 20 Royals have just gone up by 11p.

Wake me up after the next election.


* I haven't a clue if this is a real word. It should be.