Multimillionaire ministers announce their bullshit budget

George Gideon Osborne prepares to shoulder the burden of the economic crisis by cutting down on fancy waistcoats.

At the same time as Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Gideon Osborne, was announcing the pile of rancid shite that forms his Emergency Budget, it was also revealed that at least 23 out of the 29 coalition cabinet members are millionaires.

So while Osborne and Cameron and Clegg and their other filthy rich pals are telling us that we need to tighten our belts and “share the pain” of the brutal cuts to public services and benefit payments, plus tax hikes, they’re taking champagne baths and laughing into their gold encrusted Cornflakes.

Our very own Prime Minister David Cameron is worth £4 million, his wife SamCam gets £300,000 bonuses for fannying about with some stationary occasionally, and he’s set to inherit a whopping £30 million from his parents when they kick the bucket. Death represents a gigantic bonus for these rich families, and we’re sure the equivalent of winning the lottery several times over does take some of the sting out of bereavement for them.

The richest member of the cabinet is the Leader of the House of Lords, that undemocratic old folks home for senile ex-politicians and descendants of the chums of dead kings, Lord Strathclyde, who hordes at least £10 million all for his greedy little self. Don’t let the name fool you, I doubt he comes fae Glasgow like.

Axeman Osborne himself is worth at least £4.6 million, including a £2 million stake in his daddy’s “luxury wallpaper company”. Yet, we know he’s rubbish at wallpapering. We’ve been in his house and he’s got big bulgy bits, plus he spilt paste all over the carpet.

It’s not just the Tory cabinet members that are trousering gigantic wads and waiting breathlessly for mummy and daddy to die and leave them all their gold, the “real alternative” Liberal Democrats are a bunch of political cash cows too. Deputy Prime Minister/Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Clegg is currently worth an estimated £1.9 million, and is the son of a multimillionaire City banker.

Danny Alexander is upset to find out he's not worth £1million.

Of those 6 cabinet members that aren’t worth at least £1 million, there’s the likes of BARONESS Warsi, who is surely still worth a pretty penny, and Beaker from The Muppets Chief Secretary of the Treasury Danny Alexander. Boo hoo Acne Alexander, boo hoo for you.

It’s worth remembering that all of these figures are quite conservative (with a small ‘c’) estimates and don’t take in to account the vastly inflated salaries these parasites receive from the public purse. And what with the reputation of Tory bigwigs like Lord Ashcroft for cheating the system with scarily high levels of tax evasion, who knows what these chumps have got stashed between the Nazi gold in Swiss banks?

What makes this multimillionaires business all the more offensive is that yesterday they chose to unleash an economic blitzkrieg on the vast majority who don’t stuff their sofas with £50 notes like they do. The UK is in the midst of going through a course of severe economic shock therapy. The budget was called an “emergency” to make us think that what it contained was inevitable when in fact it is just the realisation of long-held Tory sadistic fantasies about what they’d like to do to the working class.

Here are just a few of the many ways you are getting fucked by the “emergency” budget:

"Hi everybody, I work for the DWP!"

Disability Living Allowance - It’s going to get even harder to receive this benefit. To qualify for DLA currently, you already have to go through a medical assessment to prove you really need it. The government’s announcement that they will “introduce a medical assessment for Disability Living Allowance from 2013 for new and existing claimants“. What this actually means is that they’re going to make it even harder to pass the assessments made by the quacks so-called “doctors” they employ to try and trick the vulnerable out of what they need to survive. Those responsible for this are not doctors, violating the first rule of medicine, do no harm. The government has decided that being a disabled person living on meagre benefits is such a laugh riot, that to restrict slightly the hedonistic lifestyles of these publicly funded wheelchair racers they’ll have to pass an exam in how sick they are first. These assessments are humiliating, frightening and about as useful as a statement of medical fact as a Harold Shipman death certificate.

VAT - Value Added Tax is one of the unfairest taxes that can be raised from ordinary people. It’s basically a cut that the government takes out of the price of essential things we all have to buy at the shops, and so the government’s raising of it to 20% will hit the cost of living for everyone. Instead of raising income taxes or others that proportionally work out how much you need to pay based on how much you actually have, they’ve deliberately chosen to raise the one that hits the poorest hardest and leaves the super rich like themselves relatively unscathed. Raising VAT at the same time as chucking people off benefits is the ultimate Tory wet dream, condemning many to the borderline of survival.

A single parent struggles to cope with the increase in VAT

Corporation tax – Meanwhile, no surprise that the tax on the ultra rich mega corporations is getting cut to even lower levels. If you want to know who’s really in power in the UK, look at who’s done the best from the budget. Companies like the Gulf poisoners BP, merchants of death British Aerospace and public money vampires Royal Bank of Scotland. The tax they pay will be lowered to the scandalously tiny rate of 24%, less than half what they paid under the Thatcher overlordship (56%).

Parents - It’s going to get much harder to have a kid under the ConDems. Ultimately they want to scrap child benefit, one of the few remaining universal benefits. In the meantime, they’re freezing it for the next three years. People with babies will no longer be eligible for child tax credits, perhaps justified by the fact that babies are clearly the most self reliant of all children. And a grant that was previously paid to pregnant women to support them and cut infant mortality is to be withdrawn. Lone parents will also be forced to look for work as soon as their kids start school. There’s only one clear conclusion to draw: the government hates children.

George Osborne hard at work

These horror stories are just a flavour of the vicious hacking you’re going to get from the Tories’ rusty knives. The “emergency” budget is just the start of the cuts agenda – everything except health and international aid is being cut over the next 4 years. So the real level of disaster they’re going to inflict on us is yet to be seen. In Scotland, we’ll be hit by a double whammy in the next Scottish Parliament budget, when we get two years worth of cuts in the budget of one.

For a full breakdown of the full economic violence we’re being subjected to, check out the upcoming issue of the Scottish Socialist Voice, which will feature in depth analysis from socialist economists. It’ll be available to buy on anti-cuts actions throughout the country, such as the street rally against the budget taking place this weekend in Glasgow. On Saturday people will be taking to the streets from 12 noon, on Buchanan Street, to protest the fact that it and other financial institutions have been kept profitable with our money, whilst the poor majority are face cuts and tax hikes.

In the meantime, check out the alternative budget produced by the SSP, outlining the many simple ways these cuts could be prevented. The fact of the matter is that the government is desperate for you to believe their cuts are inevitable, but in fact they are politically motivated policies aimed at making the rich richer at our expense. To see how things could be done differently, such as our plan to recoup a whopping £120 billion in evaded taxes by rich cunts, have a look here.

Above is exclusive future footage of Scotland just four years after the release of the “emergency” budget

(Additional reporting by Jack)