Fan bluuddy tastic.

Impacts of Tory budgets since 2015 by income decile.

Helping those just about managing top 20%. The poorest 20% don't need the money, so it's right the Tories are making them considerably worse off, while making the richest better off. I bet every single person in the bottom 2 deciles would just have spent that £1,200 a year on fags and booze so it's doing them a favour really.

Also railcards for young people will help them no end. Especially as you can't use in rush hour to get to or from work. Given the housing crisis and cost of living crisis this will be exactly what people under 30 need to help afford a deposit on a house and put money into a private pension and pay the £57k debt they have from their education.

Attachment: IFS Budget 2017.jpg (69.24Kb)

What has political parties got to do with it?

So if people voted Lab or lib we'd all be loaded and life would be brilliant? Yeah right....

Paua oouaarancì Irà chiyeah Ishé galé ma ba oo ah

Scare talk about debt and deficits is often used as a cover for a very different agenda, namely an attempt to reduce the overall size of government and especially spending on social insurance. This has been transparently obvious in the United States, where many supposed deficit-reduction plans just happen to include sharp cuts in tax rates on corporations and the wealthy even as they take away healthcare and nutritional aid for the poor. But it’s also a fairly obvious motivation in the UK, if not so crudely expressed. The “primary purpose” of austerity, the Telegraph admitted in 2013, “is to shrink the size of government spending” – or, as Cameron put it in a speech later that year, to make the state “leaner ... not just now, but permanently”.

Plus Brexit. I still haven't heard how we are suppoed to afford the £40bn divorce bill or the 8,000 civil servants we are apparently going to need to sort out the legislative mess in the time of austerity.

What was that about the money tree?