"LONDON business chiefs today called on Alistair Darling to use this week's Budget to get tougher on spending cuts and rein in tax rises on the better off...Urging a stronger focus on cuts, they called for a specialist unit in the Cabinet Office to find spending reductions, staffed by civil servants and senior figures from the private sector.... In other news, reports are still coming in that the Pope is indeed Catholic."
Okay, I added that last bit myself; but I wouldn't have noticed it first time round reading on the Tube. How, exactly, is this a news story? Rich people don't want to pay tax. Well, that's not true every day of the year. Not only that, but the obviously dispassionate views of organised business on public spending are assumed to be newsworthy, to the point now that all of the major newspapers (and the Labour government, to their shame) take it for granted that Britain is undergoing a deficit crisis of Greek proportions, when in fact the UK's deficit before the 2008 crash was lower than Japan, Italy, Germany, France and the United States, many of whom have no trouble getting international loans. (I don't need to mention that the issue of who will be most affected by cuts in public spending isn't raised. Actually, I just did. Yeah, take it).
Something similar has happened with the current battle between arse-wipe managers at BA. ('Capital', by the way) and the more-than-reasonable (as in, willing to take a fucking pay cut) Unite union. ('Labour', just to make sure). The view that the holidays of tourists outweigh the livelihoods of thousands of BA workers is all we can hear; the only BA employees paid any attention are anonymous scabs.
But at least the Standard article afforded me one pleasure: that of seeing the private sector demand cuts in public spending, and then ask for their own 'senior figures' to be given public money to carry this out. Wankers.
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