Just so that no one is in ANY doubt: when Mr Frown became Prime Monster earlier this year, he chose as his Chancellor of the Exchequer… Mr Frown.
That bloke with the eyebrows is there to answer the telephones, fetch the coffees and occasionally pop up in front of the nation's press and terrify everyone into a run on a major bank.
It IS a good trick – you can BARELY see Mr Frown's lips moving!
Take a look at this picture of Mr Frown's CABINET and see if YOU can spot the GRANT SHAPPS:
Darling, Vain, Balls and Millipede
It is not an UNFAMILIAR situation – Lord Blairimort's foreign secretary was… Lord Blairimort, leaving Mrs Bucket to carry the bags (even if she usually managed to avoid carrying the can – see also her time at the Ministry for Failing to Feed our Farmers).
The give away, of course, is when you spot the Prime Monster's hand stuck up their DISPATCH BOX.
What's that you say, Sooty? You want to make a Pre-Budget Report to the House of Commons? Well, you know what to do:
"Izzy Wizzy, Let's Get Busy!"
As if by MAGIC, headline grabbing policies appear! Or, at least in many papers, headlines ABOUT policy grabbing.
Much of the talk was of the "cut in inheritance tax for couples".
This left my Daddy Richard CONFUSED for a long time. "How can a COUPLE have an Inheritance Tax allowance?" he asked – knowing well that the Tax Man does not believe in people dying SIMULTANEOUSLY.
After a while we worked out that what this ACTUALLY meant. Up to now, everyone has had an allowance of £300,000 – you can leave money or the cash value in goods up to that amount FOR FREE, no tax will be deducted. Everything OVER that amount gets 40% deducted and whisked away to Mr Frown's treasury vaults.
EXCEPT… anything that you left to your SPOUSE – or your CIVIL SPOUSE if you are gay mummies or daddies – was tax free no matter how much you left. Which was nice, and helped to stop little old ladies (or gentlemen) getting a big bill from the tax man just after losing a loved one.
The CATCH with this GENEROUS SEEMING exemption was this: both granny AND granddad have a £300,000 allowance, but if one leaves everything to their other half, then between them they LOSE one of the £300,000 tax free amounts.
Rich people would employ TAX ACCOUNTANTS to tell them that the BETTER way of settling their affairs was for granddad to leave £300,000 (tax free, remember) to the kids or grandkids or BABY ELEPHANT, and all the rest (also tax free, remember) to granny. Or vice versa. THEN, when granny goes to join him, there is ANOTHER £300,000 saved from the Tax Man.
All that the Darling Chancellor has done is to make this arrangement AUTOMATIC. That is to say, that granny (or granddad) will effectively INHERIT her hubby's £300,000 allowance so there is no longer any need for the fiddly ACCOUNTANCY.
What it DOESN'T do is make anyone REALLY better off – it is not giving anyone anything BACK; it just stops some people falling into an ELEPHANT TRAP.
(That's he has set aside one-and-a-half BILLION pounds to cover any shortfall, just shows what a LARGE and EFFECTIVE trap it was!)
Mr Gideon Oboe doesn't seem to have worked this out. Which isn't very surprising.
Instead, and in another sign of how CLOSE the Labour and the Conservatories have become, he stood up and accused the Chancellor of delivering the SAME speech that HE would have done.
The Conservatories have sworn to follow the Labour's spending; now, the Labour are implementing the Conservatories' tax cuts.
If you can get a CIGARETTE PAPER between them, then the chances are that it was FATTY CLARKE who sold it to you! Of course, HE was on the Radio in the morning criticising the Government for putting up borrowing… says the man who tripled the national debt in one go AND invented most of the STEALTH TAXES. That RAID on your pensions? THAT was to pay off the tab what Fatty Clarke ran up!
The Conservatories are just CROSS because Mr Frown has shot another couple of their Foxes. NOT Fantastic Dr Fox – we couldn't get THAT lucky – but their policies of cutting Inheritance tax and giving a tax break for married couples. Mr Frown, sorry, Chancellor Dialling-Tone's stunt has at least winged both of them with one blast.
It puts them in a real pickle too – they will have to think about repealing what the Chancellor has just done OR scrapping the policy that they have had for, oooh eight days, because they SERIOUSLY could not afford to allow people to hand out DOUBLE HELPINGS of one million pound tax exemptions. Expect to see Master Gideon being STUMPED by that one repeatedly in the coming weeks.
The Liberal Democrats, on our own, one against two again, still have a DISTINCTIVE tax agenda: our GREEN TAX SWITCH – cutting Income Tax, a tax cut that is generous to everyone not just millionaires like Mr Balloon, in order to give people a PROPER CHOICE over how their money is spent; raising taxes on pollution and carbon emissions because only WE are going to take the action needed RIGHT NOW to save the environment.
I'm GLAD that Mr Frown, sorry, Chancellor Dialling-Tone has seen the WISDOM of taxing flights not passengers, and investment in new green technology is good too. But these are HALF MEASURES or FUDGES (like not spending enough on flood defences even after this year!).
Clearly, if you want something doing properly, if you want a REAL change in the Budget, get a LIBERAL DEMOCRAT to do it!
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