Rich Man Joins Social Network! Fails to Engage the Lower Classes!

As of about 8.15am, on Wednesday 20h March 2013, Gideon 'George' Osbourne joined the quagmire of nonsense that is Twitter. Not that anyone will really care after about 5 minutes of realising and once they've sent one tweet expressing their opinion of him. His first foray into the muddy waters was a brief, not overly insightful and rather self-indulgent:

'Today I'll present a Budget that tackles the economy's problems head on helping those who want to work hard & get on'

It was made worse by the use of this picture as an accompaniment:

                                       
I won't spend any time attempting to present some form of analysis of the picture, how it's structured or what it says about Gideon's PR people. I'll just settle for stating the obvious; it's clearly faked as no one can actually write with a suitcase on their desk. He's also holding his pen next to a typed section - with no sign of wet ink in sight - but I'm going to leave the analysis to the experts/ obsessives/ people who have nothing better to do than write sprawling blog entries about politicians vague attempts to engage with the public.

I'm not entirely sure what to make of the decision taken by Gideon's team to introduce him to Twitter, or what effect they think it'll have on his non-existent popularity. If anything it'll just give people an easy avenue through which they can vent their fury at the 'verified' account of one of the many incompetent people charged with the job of running the country.

Not that Gideon's team would ever let him actually look at the replies for fear of him feeling bullied and wondering 'why the peasants don't like what I'm doing'.

So as to not disregard all analysis, I should point out that what I can skim from the phrasing of this introduction, notably the reference to 'work hard and get on' aside from opening up possibilities for cheap innuendo, is that it's a phrase which will please the right-wing press as it'll mean they can say 'OSBOURNE ATTACKS BENEFIT SCROUNGERS IN BUDGET'. This is somewhat ironic given the stereotypical demographic of such newspapers.

I am also glad that he is hoping to present a budget which will 'tackle the economy's problems' as if there was another option; 'a budget which won't really help anyone except those who are too rich to care, like me'.  It is after all, the job of the Government to make sure that things don't go all Greek over here. Or Spanish, Portuguese, Icelandic...

Ultimately though, I do rather wish that politicians would spend less time attempting to interact with people via social networks and spend more time getting on with the job which they are paid to do. A shocking and controversial opinion I know. If this latest foray into the 21st Century is being thought of as an attempt to 'digitalise' those in power and 'engage with the big web of chatter' that is the internet. Then I must once again ask you this; do you really think that anyone who doesn't already follow the news either online, television, radio or print will somehow be introduced to Gideon now that he's come down to their level? I doubt it.

I like to have some insight and analysis with my news, and I don't always like it to come straight from the horses mouth, as by the time it's reached it there have already been numerous meetings to finalise each and every syllable which he will then say to the press such that it needs an interpreter to actually work out what was 'not' being said. There's going to be hundreds of blogs about Gideon, Twitter and the Budget today.

Isn't the internet fun.

I'm no Economist, but I can't escape the feeling that if we just stopped fiddling, the world would sort itself out

                                

Money, money, money, no one really understands what to do with it

At the end of last week, the EU leaders agreed on a 'historic' budget for the next seven years of something like £900bn. The actual figure was calcuated in Euros, but when you're dealing with numbers of this size, currency and exchange rates are pretty irrelevant. We'd be better off just saying 'a lot of money' or 'more money that any of us could ever really conceive of in any tangible way. It was also apparently a 'Victory' for DC as he'd achieved a 'cut' in the overall budget, but Britain's contributions were going to continue to rise. Meaning that Nigel Farage had an excuse to get on tv again, something which none of us really want. 

On the subject of Mr Farage, I'd like to take this opportunity to quote a tweet, of which I cannot recall the author, but whoever they are this is their joke: 'Voting UKIP because you don't like Labour or the Tories is like saying "I don't like Coke or Pepsi so I'll drink piss"'. 

It's unlikely that any of us will actually feel any noticable effect of the new deal with Europe, not that that justifies an obfuscation of the matter, as it does remain important. The point which I'm trying to make here is that getting up and angry about the actual economics seems to be a waste of time, unless you're an economist who understands what the problems (or otherwise) are with the way the deal has been done and why such large sums of money are being passed around in cyberspace. 

It's a similar issue with many of the broad sweeping cuts and the headlines that accompany them. Take this story for example 'Inheritance tax freeze to fund social care cap of £75,000'. In principle, I understand what they're trying to achieve. Which is people not having to pay for care when they reach retirement age, I can also see that what Jeremy *unt is attempting to do is tax people who get a large inheritance in order to pay for those who don't have much left to give when they die as they've sold it all to pay for care. 

Actually, this is a relatively straightforward example of how the Government is trying to make things better, however, as you read down the article it soon becomes clear that things are going to cost £Xbn or £Ym making the entire plan seem grossly over-complicated. This is accompanied by the news that the UK Economy 'slipped back towards recession in the last quarter of 2013'. What does that actually mean though?! When growth is less than 0.5% the only people who seem to be getting concerned over the economics are economists. 

Despite the fate of both Jessops and HMV in the first month of January (the latter of which is downsizing but looks to be moving towards some kind of resolution) for many other business (including the small business for which I work) business has greatly improved in the first 6 weeks of the new year.