I will say this, however. George Osborne, David Cameron and their rich bastarding Tory fuckers are evil gits. In my opinion, anyway. Ok, so the personal allowance threshold for tax is going up, which will help me out a bit. But it doesn't cover the increase in the cost of living, so I'm not actually any better off as a result of it. And I can assure you, that I am most definitely considered 'low income'. I'm not on minimum wage, but I'm not a kick in the arse off of it either - despite the fact that I should be earning at least 50% more than I currently do, given the responsibilities, experience and so on that my job requires, but that's a whole nother rant.
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| What a fucking twat. |
Osborne the Twat messed about with pension allowances as well, in what's being called the 'granny tax', to an extent that will apparently save the Treasury hundreds of millions of pounds, but won't leave any pensioner any worse off 'in cash terms', whatever that means. If you think that those things don't exactly add up, that's because you're right. They don't. They make no sense whatsoever. Because the Tory scumbags in charge are lying bastards who don't care about people on lower incomes, even if they're elderly and having to choose between heating and food. But then again when you're talking about people who are cousins of the Queen and come from aristocratic families, it's little wonder that they have no idea what real life is like for most of us.
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| Srsly, like, what a punchable face he has. |
Then they put a ridiculously huge amount on the price of cigarettes - now, don't get me wrong, I'm as anti-smoking as they come. It's a disgusting habit and it costs the NHS a fortune each year treating illnesses and symptoms caused by it, and there is evidence to suggest that rising prices on cigarettes discourage people from smoking. However, there are also people like my parents still around who have been smoking for 50-odd years, if not more, and they're somewhat beyond help. They've tried everything going to give up smoking, and whilst they've succeeded in cutting down dramatically, they just can't give up permanently. Particularly as it's become a stress relief technique for them, and given that they're pensioners finding it more and more difficult to make ends meet, it's understandable that it's so hard for them to completely give up a habit which makes them feel slightly more relaxed. They don't drink, they don't have any other real indulgences or luxuries in life, and this is an unfortunately horrific habit which makes them feel a tiny bit more prepared to get through the day, so I can't judge them or other people like them too harshly for it.
Speaking of all the cutbacks they've been making, being able to leave the house might soon be one of them, because this budget did absolutely nothing about the continuingly increasing price of fuel. They didn't freeze the duty on it (it's due to go up another few pence next week I understand, and again after that), let alone reduce it. Given that this comes from people who have chaffeur-driven cars to get around the corner, I find this hard to stomach. I understand that people need to use public transport more and use cars less - particularly when it comes to people driving relatively short distances to work, sitting in their car alone, when they could easily catch a train or a bus instead. But there are people in rural areas, and people like my parents with mobility issues who simply can't go about anything resembling a life without their car. The cost of fuel is forcing them to have to give up their cars and significantly reducing their standard of living. How happy would you be if you couldn't leave the house to visit people, if you couldn't go further than a quarter of a mile to a shop (and end up having to spend more at the shops closer to you than be able to go to supermarkets with better deals), and if you were never able to attend any family event without having to find someone to impose upon for a lift, if that were even possible? For pensioners like my parents who aren't getting out to work everyday anymore, that's a huge blow. It might sound like that's being fussy in a recession, where we all have to make do and tighten our belts and so on - but just imagine how it would feel to have worked your whole life, to have nothing to show for it when you've gotten to the stage that you're unfit for work anymore, that you're having to struggle to make ends meet, and the little tiny things that bring you some sense of comfort or normality like being able to go across town to visit family, or nip down to the supermarket, are taken away from you?
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| Yeah, we're all in it together. My fucking arse we are. |
If someone can explain to me why this budget just continued to put more and more pressure on those already on the lowest incomes and in the worst situations, yet gave a tax cut to the highest earners in society, I'd really appreciate that. Maybe I'm being too emotionally swayed by my own and my parents' situations, but we aren't alone in this. There are thousands, millions of people around the country in the same boat. They haven't ended up there because they're lazy, or they don't work hard enough or they can't be bothered or because they want to live beyond their means. They've just had bad luck - to get stuck in jobs that don't pay much and can't find anything else in the current job market. To have become too ill to work and been left with a mortgage to pay into their pension years. To have had the misfortune to live in an area which became run down and degraded by political strife, thus vastly reducing the value of their house when it was sold. And dozens of other such things that aren't anyone's fault, that just happen. Why are people like that being told that they have to make sacrifices, while people earning more in a month than I do in a year are able to get even more money back from the government?
Tory fucking bastards, that's why. I'd like to be able to give a much more informed, reasoned and objective account of last week's budget but I lack both the willpower and the understanding of economic politics. All I know is I'm fucking disgusted with these people, and I hope that the people who voted for them are too.
And on a vaguely related note, I despair for our future. I was sitting on the bus this morning on my way to work and there were 12-13 year old girls at the back of the bus. They were acting in what is apparently the official teenage manner of this generation, which is to say they were being loud, obnoxious, playing music on their phones and singing extremely badly to it. One of them started singing the Cranberries song Zombie, and another one told her, in the most glorious Belfast accent imaginable "Here, that's a fenian song, that's a fenian song, don't be singing that, there's a real version, fer pratenstants leek, that one's the fenian one". Charming. It was only when they starting singing loudly about sticking things up one's bum that the bus driver told them to be quiet. I'm used to kids from this particular school being vulgar, obnoxious and generally hateful on the bus, but when they display that sort of utterly ignorant sectarianism, it just depresses me. What hope does this country have if kids that young - who were born after the ceasefires and have thus never even experienced the Troubles proper - think it's ok to think and talk like that? Children are supposed to be our hope, our future. If those kids are any indication, that's not a future I want anything to do with. I hope that they're in the minority, but my experience suggests that in certain parts of this city at least, they aren't.
On a much more superficial level, also sucking today is the eternal wait for my iPad, having to work on gorgeously sunny days, and waiting for replies to text messages.
