JUSTIN DUNN’S ROOM 101 We are completely f**ked!
WHAT’S ANNOYING HIM THIS WEEK?
I HAVE a pal called Brian who used to work in Hungary.
It was a fancy job in something or other to do with money, based in the capital, Budapest.
Crunching numbers in a foreign land with a foreign language.
Now, Brian is from an area not very far from me that is generally considered not to be the nicest.
His family home, where he now lives with his dog, is less than a mile from one of the most notorious pubs ever.
Yet this bloke from the hood speaks in a cut glass accent.
He got a first from Oxford – whatever that means – and wouldn’t sound out of place in one of those fancy period dramas on telly that I will never, ever watch.
I can’t describe what his job was, exactly, because, as a merely average pleb, I never really understood it.
My work involves only words, whereas his was mainly numbers.
And numbers to me are like a visual version of white noise. I know they are there, but I can’t quite see or understand them.
In truth, the only time numbers make sense to me is when the cash machine says: “No. F**k off.”
Then I know, at least, that I am out of numbers for the immediate time being.
Economics
And that conversation, which we had in a beer garden on a sunny afternoon, was not held in the last few weeks.
It was in 2017, long before any of us had started to use words like “pandemic”, “masks”, “furlough”, “vaccines”, and “eat out to help out”.
It was before Vladimir Putin finally lost the plot, too.
And way before anyone had really heard of Liz Truss, and certainly long before the phrase “Kwasi Kwarteng, Chancellor of the Exchequer” was ever even a consideration.
Since that chat, having been locked up for the best part of two years, with schools closed, universities doing their typical least-as-possible, GPs going missing, tools downed across the nation apart from a few pans getting half-heartedly banged, we have still carried on to splurge BILLIONS of pounds.
And the answer to how to tackle that enormous debt burden has been, as ever, to make it even bigger.
The Conservative Party answer to us plummeting down into the remorselessly black pit of debt despair is to borrow even more.
To let someone else worry about it all tomorrow. To hope that tomorrow never comes. I rang Brian on Monday morning, mainly to ask about his dog, but just for the hell of it – and because I needed something to write about – I decided to throw the economic outlook question at him.
“I once told you we were f**ked,” he said, poshly. “But not anymore.
“Now, old boy, we are completely and utterly f**ked.”
But Brian is something of a master at all this stuff, and sometimes – four pints in, mind – we’d talk economics.
Or, rather, he would talk about economics and I’d occasionally nod, pretending I had the faintest idea about what he was talking about.
He never really wanted to stretch the conversation into politics, because he saw all that as entirely pointless.
He explained that as nearly all politicians and Whitehall civil servants knew absolutely bugger all about economics, our country is, to use his exact terminology: “F**ked.”
He reckoned that our collective credit cards and student loans and outrageous mortgages and ruinous bills for the NHS, for foreign aid, for the military, and all the rest of the mad shit we keep throwing money at, had the country anchored far beyond any accepted description of bankruptcy.
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