THE BODGE IT BUDGET

Alistair Darling’s budget has destroyed our generation’s future prosperity.

I listened to Wednesday’s budget announcement with a mixture of boredom and fury – and a sense of impending doom.

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We can forgive the Chancellor for being boring. Given his job he can be excused for not sounding particularly enthusiastic about what he had to announce. But what none of us should defend is the horrible fate that awaits us when we finally step out into the real world and join the hunt for jobs.

It’s not that I don’t believe that the Chancellor has good intentions. Nobody goes into politics in order to deliberately do harm to their country. But given the almost systematic manner in which the infrastructure and the public services in this country have been mishandled, we could be forgiven for thinking otherwise. There’s the Government debt, rising for the next four years to 79% of GDP; that’s £1.4 trillion. Over the next two years the treasury will be borrowing more money since the Bank of England was founded more than 300 years ago than all governments put together. It’s a staggering amount of money and it’s us who will be paying it all back.

I feel sorry for those among us who will be leaving university this year. The jobs will be scarce, the competition harsh. And even if jobs can be found, they may be on a part-time or short-term basis. Those of us who have another one or more years to go will find ourselves in equally unenviable positions. Don’t kid yourself; the next few years will be tough. We will undoubtedly have to pay back more of our wages in taxes and we will receive fewer benefits in return. The last 10 years have seen people live above their means; the next 10 years will see people suffer as a result. This single matter constitutes the greatest failing of our government, and is probably one of the biggest cases of governmental oversight in our nation’s history.

So what would I want to see changed? I would like to see some realism and some honesty from the Government. All this budget did was push the pain further away, like someone taking out a new credit card to avoid paying off their current debts.

We needed the budget to give us the truth, to tell us that there will be pain, but that there’s a way to get through it. This budget didn’t do that; the Government closed its eyes and pretended the problem didn’t exist. Life will go on and the public finances will be restored. But it will be a long and painful journey for us all.