The UK Budget 2016.

Last Wednesday (16/3/16) the UK government announced the 2016/17 national budget.

In May voters in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland will go to the polls in their national assembly elections. On the same day voters in London, England will elect a new Mayor and members of the London Assembly. There will also be elections in roughly half of England's local councils.

In June all of the UK will go to the polls in a referendum to decide whether to leave or remain in the European Union (EU).

As such it was clear that the Chief Finance Minister (Chancellor of the Exchequer) George Osborne had been instructed to make this budget as bland as possible.

This is exactly what he did with the majority of the budget being taken up with the implementation of changes to tax policy that had been agreed at a meeting of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) back in November 2015. 

In order to get excited about these 86 changes you probably already need to be working as a tax accountant. For example I could tell you about the new way that future interest payments can be offset against current profits for the purposes of corporation tax. However I fell asleep halfway through writing that sentence.

In terms of the EU referendum it seems clear the government's calculation is that the poor working classes are too stupid to understand the issue so will simply vote to leave due to immigration. Therefore the outcome of the vote will be decided by middle-class voters who tend to lean towards the governing Conservative (Tory) Party. 

As such both Osborne and the Prime Minister David Cameron who both support the remain campaign were clearly using this budget as a desperate attempt to get those voters to like and therefore agree with them.

The most obvious part of this effort was the increase personal income tax free allowance to £11,000 by 2017. This will obviously benefit taxpayers across all three tax brackets. However it will be particularly beneficial to people who are just at the boundary between the 20% basic rate paid up to £31,780 (£41,780 incl the allowance) and the 40% higher rate paid beyond that up to £150,000.

The other headline grabbing announcement was a new tax of soft-drinks (soda) levied in three bands depending on their sugar content. This has been dubbed; "The Sugar Tax."

Rather like the MMR vaccine in the early-2000's sugar in food has become a bit of an obsession amongst emotionally unstable middle-class parents in the posher parts of London. 

These are the sort of people who their baby supplies from Jessica Alba's "Honest Company" and religiously follow every update of Gwyneth Paltrow's "Goop" lifestyle website. As far as they're concerned there is no greater sin a parent can commit than giving child sweets. On the sugar issue they have an (organic) homegrown campaign hero in the form of Jamie Oliver who is certainly a better TV personality than he is a cook.

So by imposing the sugar tax Osborne gets to give all those neurotic middle-class parents a warm fuzzy feeling inside and showing that he shares their priorities.

The problem is that this sugar tax is not levied at the point of sale like say the tax on tobacco products. As such there is absolutely no guarantee that manufacturers and retailers will pass the tax onto the end consumer causing prices to rise. 

This rise in price in order to reduce consumption is the core reasoning behind this type of "Sin Tax." However with the sugar tax estimated to bring in £520m per year you suspect a drop in consumption is the last thing the Chancellor wants.

In a similar vein the budget also included wildly off-topic plans to remove all British schools from government control by 2020. 

The next day this was followed up by plans to scrap the qualification that sees student teachers having to train on the job for a minimum of one year and then pass a test to prove they're competent. Instead the head teacher - or as is becoming more common general manager - of a school can arbitrarily declare anyone they want to employ to be a qualified teacher.

The same middle-class parents who consider Haribo to be the new way of spelling Hitler view this as a way to create boutique, artisanal learning environments for their delightful progeny. Tristam's father who does something very clever in the city can come in and teach maths while Jocasta's nanny can help out teaching the children Mandarin which will be vital when the Chinese run the World.

As such along with the sugar tax this plan was introduced to produce a warm, fuzzy feeling all the way from Battersea to Clapham South.

The problem arises when you leave the cosseted world of South London for poorer areas where schools see much less engagement from parents who are earning significantly less than £40,000 per year. There are particular problems in northern cities such as Bradford where Islamic extremists and some Ultra-Orthodox Jews see this absence of government oversight in education as license to teach children their own brand of medieval babbling that has no place in the real world. 

In fact it was this national inconsistency in education standards that caused the then Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher to introduce a standardised national school curriculum - "The National Curriculum" - in 1988. In order to allow for schools to be taken out of local government control it was announced in the budget that this national curriculum is to be scrapped.

The real reason behind these educational reforms of course is that schools under local government control have to negotiate pay and conditions deals with Trade Unions for teachers under collective bargaining agreements. Schools outside of local government control don't.

 
In protest at the Chancellor's slashing of education budgets these teaching unions - the National Union of Teachers (NUT) being the largest - went out on strike in 2015. They're going to go out on strike later this month. It appears that in order to extract his revenge George Osborne has decided to adopt a scorched earth policy with not even the achievements of his cherished Margaret Thatcher being spared.

What's turned out to be the real headline grabber though is cuts to disability benefit. Specifically Personal Independence Payments (PIP's). Unlike Employment Support Allowance (ESA) PIP's are intended primarily as an in work benefit. The idea being that they help meet the additional costs of living with a disability.

All the recent news coverage produced a rather good example in the form of a woman with Multiple Sclerosis (MS). 

Although her condition is not yet so bad it stops her from working part time in an office job - I think telesales - it does significantly restrict her mobility preventing her from doing household chores. As such she has no choice other than to pay someone to come into her home to do those chores for her. Without PIP's to pay for that she would have to ask her employer for a pay-rise. Her employer would then likely chose to employ someone else landing her back on ESA.

Putting aside for a moment the fact that George Osborne is a spiteful excuse for a human being the attention the proposed cuts to PIP's generated seemed intended to serve two political purposes.

The first of these is Britain's relationship with the EU. Particularly at the emergency EU Council (EUCO) summit that began the following day.

Up until around 2013 disability benefits were my sole source on income. However through the changes that brought ESA and PIP's into being I was suddenly declared healthy and ineligible. Other groups of people who magically been declared healthy under the new system include the recently deceased. 

So although none of this current argument actually applies to me and hasn't applied to me for so long I've forgotten how long its been it's a convenient way to bring up the more general topic of Britain's behaviour towards me.

This has been a long term source of tension between the UK and the EU. It light of the war against ISIL it's become a particularly contentious issue. After all one element of EU meddling the leave campaign want free the UK from is this notion that you can't just force people to work for you for free. I believe it's known as "Slavery."

In a similar vein the budget also announced that Value Added Tax (VAT) - a type of sales tax - on women's sanitary products - the so-called "Tampon Tax" would be scrapped. This was done in defiance of EU rules that class those products as a luxury. However I believe it was the UK that insisted on that rule in the first place. 

At the EUCO meeting it was announced that the EU regulation would be scrapped making the UK budget change lawful. This was intended to support the remain campaign by demonstrating the UK's ability to win concessions from the EU.

The other purpose was to fire the opening shots in the run-up to the 2016 Summer Olympics to be held in Rio de-Janerio, Brazil.

Despite all this guff about ancient Greece the modern Olympics were invented by the UK at the end of the 19th Century. However since then it appears that Britain has not being receiving as much attention as it thinks it deserves. So in the 1960's Britain invented the Parallel or Para-Olympics for disabled athletes. 

For the 2012 Para-Olympics that were of course held in London, UK the British broadcaster Channel 4 developed a special show called "The Last Leg." 

Shown at the end of each day of competition this took a light-hearted look at the day's events helping to explain disabled sport in between stupid jokes about competitors whose names sounded a bit dirty and that guy who tripped over in the crowd while carrying a tray of drinks. The show was a huge success particularly amongst the competitors and if anything almost made the Para-Olympics cooler than the Olympics.

Unfortunately Channel 4 then decided to cash in by trying to turn The Last Leg into a regular satirical news show similar to the globally famous "The Daily Show" without much success. Things got really bizarre when they ran a series of The Last Leg in January and February of 2014. However the series ended pretty much the week before the 2014 Winter Olympics started.

This year The Last Leg will be getting back to its roots and broadcasting live from Brazil throughout the Para-Olympics.

Although it's terrible as a satirical news show "The Last Leg" is very good when it comes to disability and disability rights issues. For example the main presenter Adam Hills is a single below the knee amputee while one of his co-presenter Alex Brooker would probably be classed for Para-Olympic competition as a single below the knee and double below the elbow amputee.

As such they've been extremely vocal and probably the only mainstream critics of the government's cuts to disability benefit payments. This current argument over PIP's is far from new. Every budget and mini-budget since the spring of 2010 have included savage cuts to some form of disability benefits amid cuts to pretty much everything else.

Just the week before the 2016 budget the cuts to ESA announced in the 2015 budget finally passed into law. The delay was caused by the fact the upper house of Parliament - the House of Lords - had rejected them several times. This forced the government to invoke a little used procedure whereby a proposal that has been passed by the lower house - the House of Commons - four times can bypass the House of Lords to become law.

In response to the government forcing through an unpopular measure in the face of stiff opposition most of that week's episode of The Last Leg was dedicated to a rant against Ian Duncan Smith - the senior Work and Pensions minister who devised all these cuts. The general gist was that Duncan Smith should give up the country mansion that his wife's rich daddy pays for and try and live on £3,500 a year. However I've cleaned that up a lot.

So when the news broke that Duncan Smith had been forced to resign over the latest round of disability benefit cuts a lot of people were interested to see how The Last Leg would respond when they went live around two hours later. Thus boosting The Last Leg's profile ahead of the summer Olympics.

True to form The Last Leg claimed all the credit for the resignation. This is partly true. After all there's no point giving the show such a big global stage as the Olympics only for the main topic of conversation to be what a venal and hypocritical embarrassment to the human race Ian Duncan Smith along with most of the rest of the British government really is.

At around 18:35 on 21/3/16 (UK date) I've got a tiny little bit more to add. After dinner.

Edited at around 19:55 on 21/3/16 (UK date) to add;

Obviously by announcing that he'd chosen to resign in protest against a policy that he had devised and pushed for throughout most of his political career Duncan Smith was to some extent claim the moral high ground. Given what a meaningless pantomime British politics has become I wouldn't be too surprised if this was simply laying the groundwork for Duncan Smith to return around the time of the autumn budget statement as a gesture to show how the Conservative Party had regained it's compassion.

However Duncan Smith's resignation statement seems to have been calibrated to trigger discussion about the big elephant in the room of British politics.

The big headline for the budget should have been that Osborne had missed his macro-economic targets such as cutting the deficit and reducing government borrowing. However the response to this was muted by the fact that in his six years as Chancellor Osborne has not managed to hit a single macro-economic target despite all the cuts.

The reason for this is simply that his austerity plan is a scam. It's merely a lie he tells the proles to allow him to carry out a rabidly right-wing restructuring of not only the British economy but also British society. At this point I'm seriously thinking that by attacking everyone Osborne is simply trying to kill off his own insecurities and failures.

There was a general consensus that the British public would get wise to this scam and give Osborne and the Conservatives the boot at the May 2015 General Election. However as if in an effort to prove we can't cope democracy the British public ended up giving the Conservatives a majority while the Labour Party simply impolded leaving the bizarre witterings of Jeremy Corbyn as the voice of opposition.

Osborne and Cameron have clearly taken this as a sign that they're free to do whatever they like. For example despite being told to deliver a bland budget Osborne has still managed to produce one containing such vicious attacks on the disabled and the trade unions it makes Thatcher seem like a bit of a lefty.

If the electorate won't vote Osborne out of office and he won't do the decent thing and resign we might be getting to the point where we have just let Prince Phillip shoot him.      

20:15 on 21/3/16 (UK date).