The out of touch elite plundering our wallets
Sobering stuff when your leader goes on TV to warn: ‘We must tighten our belts. We are living away beyond our means.’
ireland’s Charles Haughey did so in January 1980, but there was a problem with his plea for fiscal rectitude.
He had a fondness for Charvet shirts, a brand favoured by villains in ian Fleming’s James bond books, handmade in Paris.
With a Dublin mansion, a private island and a mistress, Haughey was the epitome of ‘one rule for you and one for me’.
i doubt Derek Mackay owns an island off County Kerry, but there was a whiff of blarney about the Finance Secretary as he pauchled more of our salaries while reading out Patrick Harvie’s budget.
Dapper Derek, all natty tie and chipmunk grin, looked every inch a man getting – i hesitate to say ‘earning’ – £108,204, plus a goldplated pension, plus expenses, plus a government chauffeur.
His more-in-sorrow-than-anger shtick belies that he and the Holyrood elite are insulated against the chill wind of avaricious government.
Churchill said: ‘A nation trying to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket trying to lift himself up by the handle.’
AnD that’s Scotland under this shower at the foot of the royal Mile, trying to grow the economy by sucking out more cash to feed the twin money pits of an unreformed nHS and public sector.
Worse is the Leftie cabal patting themselves on the back and telling each other they’ve all done very well. ‘Thirty-eight pence a week more for the lowest paid! Trebles all round!’
John Swinney moves at glacial pace at education but he’s all action in the Holyrood chamber, clapping like a man playing a concertina (give us that good-bye-ee! song, John).
The spin doctors who wrote the budget speech marked ‘Pause for applause’ here and there. How they stopped Mr Mackay reading this out is a mystery, but Sleekit Swinney was well-rehearsed. He gave it laldy with the flapping hands and the lumpen SnP ranks joined in like they’d been told. Kim Jong-un would have approved.
Transport in this country is a disgrace, but barely had Mr Mackay – droning like a child delivering the P7 end of term report – declared that he was putting more money into walking and cycling (10 per cent of the trunk roads budget!) than up popped Humza Yousaf.
You’d think a man as all-at-sea as the Transport Minister would keep a Michael Matheson-style low profile, but Humza doesn’t realise his great future is all behind him.
He was straight out with jokes about Tories leaving the country because of the tax hikes – puerile stuff that any P7 kid would have been wise enough to bodyswerve.
ross greer is Che guevara in short trousers. The green Party education spokesman (no, really, he is) read in The guardian that private schools are bad. So he is determined to reduce this successful sector to the same shambles that public-sector schools are mired in and welcomed the ‘overdue’ stripping of business rates relief from private schools.
This will likely first impact on bursary-funded places for less welloff pupils, but ross’s history class hasn’t got to ‘Pyrrhic victory’ yet.
The budget underscored that a self-obsessed and other-worldly clique of professional politicians is now in charge of our lives.
The archetype is nicola Sturgeon. Watch what she’s wearing next time she does that wee headshake as she tells us we’ve never had it so good, despite ‘the Toarrreees’.
Charvet does womenswear these days.