ANOMALIES

A change to normal format to which I will return next time.  So next blog will have a couple of yarn reviews, and other crafty stuff.  Meanwhile…..

Rant time, so you have been warned!  Feel free to leave now and come back another time when I am not "incandescent with rage"!

Unless you live outwith the UK you will know we had a budget this week.

The same government that encourages people to work beyond conventional retirement age, has now announced that because pensioners have difficulty completing tax forms, the tax system is to be simplified.  This simplification has the effect of costing me financially.  So I wonder how I could be considered mentally fit to work but not capable of completing a form.  A huge chunk of my career involved form filling and assisting people of all ages to complete them.  Strange, then, that now my faculties and abilities will not stretch to putting my name on a form.

Double whammny too in the budget for those of my generation.  Not only do we lose the tax enhanced threshold for seniors, but we will not be eligible for the new flat rate pension when it is introduced.  So we will be sitting on the bus alongside other pensioners, who because they kept the stork waiting, will be substantially better off  than us, when their state pension is put into pay.

Budgets inevitably produce winners and losers.  But to win and benefit from this budget one needed to be rich.  Not only rich, but not prepeared to pay tax conventionally, and in fact to take every step to avoid paying the tax due.  The punishment for this tax evasion?  Mr Osborne has decided to reduce the amount of tax the rich have to pay in the forlorn hope that now they will dig deep and avoid evasion tactics.  Oh bless.  How bloody naeive is that?  Well probably not that naeive, just making sure he and his cronies come out of a budget unscathed.

Well I may be past working full time, but my feet will still take me to the polling booth, where I and many of my peers will ensure George Osborne and his fellow MPs will hopefully be toppled.   Especially the Lib Dems who sold their soul in a Faustian pact with the Tory Devil.  How Danny Alexander and Nick Clegg and Vince Cable sleep at night I will never know.   

As you will have ascertained if you are still reading this, I am not a happy bunny, and not in fit state to write a nice crafty blog.  So am off now to cool down.

If anyone else wants a rant, feel free, there is a comments box on here.