UK politics

So it turns out UK government revolves around Excel sheets

IT is not magic pixie dust, UK politics
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Damian McBride explains how the Budget process works:

Each viable idea – called a ‘Starter’ – is given a snappy 4-5 word description – a useful discipline to check whether it can be explained in one sentence – and a lead official and lead minister is assigned to it.

It’s also given a number, so if Chapter 6 of the Budget is on the environment, each relevant idea is numbered Starter 601, 602, etc. With fuel duties, etc., where there are lots of different options, they are listed out as 601a, 601b, etc.

All the starters – about 150-200 in total – are placed in an Excel file called the Budget Scorecard. Each line contains the name and number of the starter, and the amount in revenue that it will raise or cost in each of the next 5 years, before and after inflation.

Sheet 1 of the Scorecard contains the Starters which are almost certain to proceed, Sheet 2 very likelies, Sheet 3 probables, Sheet 4 not likelies, and so on. Starters are gradually promoted to Sheet 1 over a 3-4 month process, and at the bottom of Sheet 1 – constantly evolving – is the Budget arithmetic, which says how much the entire package costs or raises.

No Starter ever disappears from the Scorecard. Even if it is firmly rejected early in the process, it still lurks on a distant Sheet waiting to be recalled in case the distributional analysis of Sheet 1 calls for a measure targeted at a particular income group or segment of society.

On Budget Day, Sheet 1 is literally copied and pasted as a table into the chapter of the Red Book entitled ‘The Budget Decisions’, which is what politicians and journalists generally turn to first to see what the Chancellor’s actually announced after he’s announced it.

“Trespassing scum”

Sleaze, UK politics, Video
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HMRC boss Dave Hartnett is the man responsible for cutting dodgy deals with Vodafone, Goldman Sachs and other large corporations that have cost the taxpayer billions in lost revenue.

When we discovered that he was making his retirement speech at an elite tax avoidance conference, we couldn’t resist popping in. We donned our best Goldman Sachs and Vodafone costumes, bought some flowers and knocked up a fake award. This is what happened.



They do not like it up them, do they? Kudos for making these scroungers feel uncomfortable, even if it won’t stop them from stealing more. Not that you can call it stealing of course; everything Hartnett did for his corporate friends was strictly legal, while what those beastly protestors did was not. In this way ruling class violence is legitamised while most things the working classes can do to protect themselves against it are ruled illegal.

Consider. That twentyfive billion pounds Hartnett has given away isn’t just an abstract amount, it’s twentyfive billion less that the UK government has had to spent on social benefits or the NHS. Which means that there may have been benefit cuts that didn’t need to have happened if Hartnell had done his job, or hospital investments that didn’t happen because he couldn’t be bothered, which means that sooner or later people have died who’d still be alive without this theft. Of course those deaths can never be directly linked to his actions and perhaps it only means several thousand people’s lives on benefits will be just that little bit worse off, or people will be just that little bit longer ill than they had needed to be. But in no way can Hartnell be ever held responsible for this, as no justice system on earth ever recognises this sort of violence, just the violence of the protestor who “tresspasses” to confront him with his actions.

Which is why we should always be very careful before we decide as activists to be bound by the justice system and laws that have been designed to make their kind of violence possible, but our kind of confrontation illegal.