The Budget looms, as it does at this time every year and the depressing fact is that for most of us there is very little the Chancellor is able to do to sweeten the pill of his tough tax-raising regime.
By John Sollars, founder of Stinkyink.com
My personal view is that we are no longer in a recessionary period, but I see trading conditions remaining very difficult for the foreseeable future.
When you look at the austerity measures that Greece is having to endure and compare our relative positions in terms of national debt and the like, then you can see that we aren’t too far off being the same level of ‘basket case’ that the Greek economy has become.
How on earth did we get to this position from a point in the mid-Noughties when our ability to pay off the national debt was trumpeted from the ramparts of Westminster? Poor fiscal management and lax spending controls meant that when the whirlwind that was the banking collapse happened, we were very, very vulnerable.
This is not a short term problem, but when Mervyn King (governor of the Bank of England) says that we have to be patient, and that we are in for an extended period of austerity we, as business people, need to listen to what he is saying.
So there are no easy quick fixes in this budget; the Chancellor has got to play the long game and has no room for manoeuvre, no opportunity to go for the populist vote.
People are complaining about fuel duty, and I as a business owner and a resident of rural Shropshire, where public transport is as rare as a clean sheet at the Wolves and a car is essential, I am certainly concerned as fuel is a massive part of my living costs.
However, the bottom line is that as we all know, oil is a non-renewable resource and is going to continue to increase in price. In reality it will never fall back to price levels that we fondly remember when you could fill up your car and have change from a fiver, so we just have to lump it.
So good luck to the Chancellor this month. All the various pressure groups are lobbying him for their own self interests, but the reality is he being squeezed from all sides.
If patience is a virtue, then virtue will be wearing very thin by the time we see the next ‘give away’ Budget. It is going to be a hard and thankless five-to-ten years ahead.
