There were dramatic scenes at London’s airports last week as the dreaded day arrived…

Britain had read its newspapers and listened to its political leaders so all eyes were on the expected chaos at the country’s borders…

… The UK was on panic alert as rumours spread that hundreds of thousands of Bulgarians and Romanians were going to flood into Britain now that  European Union rules opened the borders to our fellow Europeans.

Brave Nigel Farage, leader of Britain’s main anti-European party,  gritted his teeth and faced the inevitable. Could it really happen? Could it really be as bad as this?

It was everything Mr Farage feared. There were no floods of marauding unemployed Romanian and Bulgarian workers overwhelming British airports – just a trickle of workers who already had jobs here and who were returning after their Christmas holidays with their families back in scary Romania and Bulgaria. Some of them even shook hands with that slick publicity conscious Labour MP,  Keith Vaz who was there to show us all that Romanians can actually be very nice, well-behaved people

..So why was everyone so scared?

…Could it really be true? We wondered. Well it must be because the nation’s favourite newspaper told us so…

..So even Prime Minister David Cameron was running scared.  The rumour had got to him that a notorious Romanian had sneaked through border control and was about to take his revenge on all us frightened Brits but David Cameron’s sidekick, cold-blooded George Osborne, looked as if he had already met the sinister intruder at a weekend party.

This is the man, look away now if you have a nervous disposition, he is hiding in the shadows somwehere near you, waiting to pounce. He’s a Romanian Count from the region of Transylvania….

…and he’s coming to get you, yes Mister, I mean you…

..and you Madam, no one is safe…

Yes – the Romanian is already here and he wants your blood!

Soon we won’t be able to trust anyone – you have been warned!

——————————————————————————————————————–

My novel, Stephen Dearsley’s Summer Of Love, was published  on 31 October 2013. It is the story of a young fogey living in Brighton in 1967 who has a lot to learn when the flowering hippie counter culture changes him and the world around him.

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No wonder George Osborne is feeling sick these days. All those confident predictions about his master plan for the British economy seem to be going down the pan. This morning’s news that Britain’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) fell by 0.3% doesn’t ring true with his claims that industry would take up the slack left by his austerity cuts to the public sector. If this is his Plan A, and he says there isn’t a Plan B,  maybe the Prime Minister, David Cameron, should find his own Plan B and listen to the International Monetary Fund’s recent warnings about cutting back on the austerity cuts if Britain is to avoid an unprecedented triple dip recession.  I think the rest of us all have a Plan B and that is that Osborne must go. Maybe Mr Cameron is too busy upsetting Europe and the USA over his new In or Out European policy to have time for any economic Plan A’s let alone a new Plan B.

If the economy carries on like this, Britain’s In or Out policy will be a definite Out for this government at the next General Election.

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I’ve been worried, as have many of you I’m sure, about the way our leaders here in Europe have been handling the economy. I don’t vote Conservative and never have but, even if I were a supporter of the Conservative party, I would have to admit that Britain is suffering under the worst government of my lifetime. Half-way through this parliament, they are trying to re-launch their reputation in our eyes but, sorry, no matter how many policy tinkering announcements they make this week, the central point has to remain that they are failing to sort the nation’s economy.

It seems a long time now since Gordon Brown’s government and it is now a lazy and oft-repeated mantra that the economic crisis was all his fault. Actually the opposite is true but we have chosen to forget that. Poor Gordon, one day, the history books will reassess his reputation and show that without his tough intelligence when the financial bubble burst back in 2008, we would all be in an even more serious mess than we are now.

Gordon Brown and President Barack Obama saw eye to eye at that time and while, Brown lost out to the feeble  Conservative-LibDem coalition in Britain, Obama won a second term and, hardly free from economic difficulties, he is sticking to the Obama-Brown doctrine. Looking from the devastated battlefield that is now Britain, I know which of the two countries is more likely to come out of this economic crisis any time soon.

I am not an economist, but I’m not a fool either and, for some time now, on these pages I have tried to plead the case for Obama-Brown while British chancellor George Osborne recklessly refused to back down from the austerity policy that is only just beginning to reveal its truly damaging potential. What do I know so don’t believe me but read the words of American economist Paul Krugman writing in yesterday’s New York Times. Paul Krugman is one of those brilliant journalists who can make the complexities of economics understandable to the likes of me, I just wish more people would listen to him. Here in Britain, we need to accept that we will never recover unless something is done about George Osborne.

“My spending is your income; your spending is my income. If everyone tries to slash spending at the same time, income will fall – and unemployment will soar…”

“In 2008…governments needed to step in, spending to support their economies while the private sector regained its balance. And to some extent that did happen: revenue dropped sharply in the slump, but spending actually rose as programs like unemployment insurance expanded and temporary economic stimulus went into effect. Budget deficit rose, but this was actually a good thing, probably the most important reason we didn’t have a full replay of the Great Depression. But it all went wrong in 2010. The crisis in Greece was taken, wrongly, as a sign that all governments had better slash spending and deficits right away. Austerity became the order of the day, and supposed experts who should have known better cheered the process on, while the warnings of some (but not enough) economists that austerity would derail recovery were ignored…”

“The really bad news is…(that) European leaders, having created Depression-level suffering in debtor countries without restoring financial confidence, still insist that the answer is more pain. The current British government, which killed a promising recovery by turning to austerity, completely refuses to consider the possibility that it made a mistake…. The truth is that we’ve just experienced a colossal failure of economic policy – and far too many of those responsible for that failure both retain power and refuse to learn from experience.” New York Times, 7th January 2013

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We don’t love politicians so much that we can’t enjoy it when their PR opportunities misfire – well I can’t anyway. If I find it hard to love any of our British parliamentarians these days then I hold the present Chancellor of the Exchequer, the odious George Osborne in especial disregard. For me he combines arrogance, ignorance and bigoted intelligence to a poisonous degree. He’s Britain’s Paul Ryan. What did he expect when he came to present the medals at the Paralympics yesterday? Only a very blinkered or a very stupid  politician would expect applause after masterminding the projected cuts in disability benefits. The Olympic stadium now famous for the rapturous support roared at British athletes echoed to a different tune yesterday with the eery sounds of booing as Mr Osborne was announced.  Maybe he should have listened to those angry voices rather than just tried to smirk them off.

At least he has one fan left in the UK but, what was I saying about stupid politicians? Mr Cameron, the British Prime Minister is scheduled to announce a cabinet shuffle today but I’m sure he too wasn’t listening to those boos. That George Osborne is failing in his over-politicised economic policy is now beyond question but is it too much to hope that David Cameron will dare to ditch him before he brings the whole country down with him? Sadly, there’s no chance.

Listen to those boos Mr Cameron, you’ll be hearing more of them soon.

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I bet that Cornish pasty has a bitter taste Dave. If only you didn’t keep trying to be an ordinary bloke then we wouldn’t be laughing at your latest U-turn, well, maybe. If you are lucky enough not to live in the UK during David Cameron’s premiership, you may not have seen the great hot food tax scandal that has been rocking Britain….with laughter.

Dave’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, messed up (to use a milder term than I want) the   budget the other month in a number of ways involving cock-ups over taxing ordinary people (not millionaries) – the one that is sticking in their throats was the tax on hot take-away food including such staple foods as Sausage rolls and Cornish Pasties. Dave and George, even though they are both millionaires, have been going round ever since stuffing their mouths with fast food, mmmm, delicious, they thought. So this is how the other half eats.

It wasn’t very convincing and it got them into loads of trouble in the popularity polls, oh yes, if you don’t live in the UK, you might not know that Dave and George get more unpopular every time they try to be “one of us” telling us that now that we are living through “austerity” times, we are “all in it together.” They’ve even got their coalition partner Nick Clegg chewing away. I hope they don’t choke.

Maybe it’s a trick to keep their mouths full of fast food all the time so that they don’t have to say anything about how they’ve been forced to change the policy because it just wasn’t going to work.

The Labour Party, the Opposition, can’t believe their luck. Every time Dave and George come up with a new idea, their laughing their heads off.

Who would have  guessed it, Dave, when stuffing your face seemed such a pleasant blokey thing to do – well, everyone except you and your chums, I suspect.

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This recipe is from Delia Smith’s Complete Cookery Course, Delia Smith’s Complete Illustrated Cookery Course and Delia Smith’s Christmas, apparently, you can make 24 sausage rolls if you get it right and you can eat them hot or cold without any interference from the government. Good luck and bon appetit!

Delia Smith

Ingredients
For the quick flaky pastry:
6 oz (175 g) butter
8 oz (225 g) plain flour
pinch salt
For the filling:
1 lb (450 g) good-quality pork sausagemeat
1 medium onion, peeled and grated
2 level teaspoons chopped fresh sage
1 egg, beaten
Pre-heat the oven to gas mark 7, 425°F (220°C).

The butter needs to be rock-hard from the refrigerator, so weigh out the required amount, wrap it in a piece of foil, then return it to the freezing compartment for 30-45 minutes. Meanwhile sift the flour and salt into a mixing bowl. When you take the butter out of the freezer, open it up and use some of the foil to hold the end with.

Then dip the butter in the flour and grate it on a coarse grater placed in the bowl over the flour. Keep dipping the butter down into the flour to make it easier to grate. At the end you will be left with a pile of grated butter in the middle of the flour, so take a palette knife and start to distribute it into the flour (don’t use your hands), trying to coat all the pieces of fat with flour until the mixture is crumbly.

Next add enough cold water to form a dough that leaves the bowl clean, using your hands to bring it all gently together. Put the dough into a polythene bag and chill it for 30 minutes in the refrigerator. When you’re ready to make the sausage rolls mix the sausagemeat, onion and sage together in a mixing bowl. Then roll out the pastry on a floured surface to form an oblong (as thin as you can). Cut this oblong into three strips and divide the sausagemeat also into three, making three long rolls the same length as the strips of pastry (if it’s sticky sprinkle on some flour).

Place one roll of sausagemeat on to one strip of pastry. Brush the beaten egg along one edge, then fold the pastry over and seal it as carefully as possible. Lift the whole thing up and turn it so the sealed edge is underneath. Press lightly, and cut into individual rolls each about 2 inches (5 cm) long. Snip three V-shapes in the top of each roll with scissors and brush with beaten egg.

Repeat all this with the other portions of meat and pastry.If you are going to cook straightaway, place the rolls on baking sheets and bake high in the oven for 20-25 minutes. If you want to cook them later, store them uncooked in a freezer box and freeze until needed. Although you can store the cooked and cooled sausage rolls in an airtight tin, they do lose their crunchiness. For this reason I think it is preferable to remove a few at a time from the freezer and cook them as required.

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The British Prime Minister David Cameron announced yesterday that the government’s attempts to cut debt were “proving harder than anyone envisaged.”

Who does he mean when he says “anyone”? The last government? The much-reviled ex-Prime Minister, Gordon Brown? Many leading economists? More than a few newspaper columnists? The American President?

No, when Mr Cameron says that the government’s attempts to cut debt were “proving harder than anyone envisaged” he means harder than he or the Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne and their advisers envisaged. Famously, Mr Osborne said that there was no need for a Plan B, they knew what they were doing and their policy would work. Next week, if Mr Cameron’s preparatory speech is read correctly, the British government is going to have to announce, in obfuscating words no doubt, that its policies are not working.

On the bright side, they might begin to do what other people envisaged a long time ago. Plan B anyone?

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May 2010: George Osborne, Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, was adamant that his policy was correct: cut the deficit straight away, begin the cuts immediately, cut government subsidies and shrink the public sector. Manufacturing and the rest of the private sector will step in to lead the country out of recession.

June 2011: He may still be adamant but the economic figures tell a different story:

                   British manufacturing slumps.
                   Mortgage lending drops.
                   Consumer spending falls.
                   Inflation rises to 4.5%

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I wish I understood economics. When I was a schoolboy I wanted to do A level economic history but my school couldn’t make the timetable fit for anyone doing English, History and Economic History so I did music instead.

An apparently wise man, an economist, told me once that no one really understands the economy as it is in the end all about luck or bad luck. Well he seemed wise to me who knew nothing.

During the British General election campaign, that now seems such a long time ago, I listened to the debates believing, in my naivety, that after the worst economic crisis in living memory, the nation, wisened by its often-vaunted long democratic traditions, would look at the economic policies of the rival political parties and attempt to elect the most economically convincing manifesto.

Again, I repeat, I do not really understand economics but I had been impressed by Gordon Brown, the incumbent Prime Minister’s handling of the financial crisis and I, apparently in a minority, thought that his argument that the nation should not start major financial cuts until the economy began to grow again with Government led money supply help from the Bank of England – a policy that was showing signs of working. Mr Brown had been an impressive figure at world economic summits and his ideas were very much in line with the then new President of the United States, Barrack Obama.

The Conservative Party, led by David Cameron with George Osborne as his Chancellor of the Exchequer-in-waiting, disagreed and for once in British politics, the electorate was given a clear choice between opposites. Either take the gradual approach to economic recovery or start immediately with major financial cuts. The Conservatives, propped up by the Liberals, scraped into office and those cuts began.

Meanwhile, in America, President Obama, often much maligned, persisted with the policy advocated by Gordon Brown.

Last week, Britain announced its shockingly bad trade figures with the first signs that the economy was shrinking. Figures were not entirely convincingly explained away when mr Osborne blamed a heavy  fall of snow. I wondered if Gordon Brown might be proven right after all. He warned that the Conservative’s reckless and unproven policy of rapid and draconian cuts would run the risk of a double-dip recession – a return to the bad old days of 2009 before we gave the nation a chance of recovery.

Also last week, the United States issued its financial figures and showed a healthy growth in its economy with increased exports and recovery in domestic consumption. It couldn’t be, could it, that Britain put its money on the wrong horse at the last election?

I so wish I had taken that economics A level but I would be even happier if I thought that our government ministers knew what they were doing.

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I was standing at a bus stop in pouring rain on Saturday afternoon at the spot seen in the photograph above but on a much gloomier day.

Temporarily car-less, I timed my bus journey at a time when England has been under black clouds of unforgivingly unceasing rainfall. My wait here on saturday was a long one.

The stop is in front of one of the nation’s most well-known buildings, Brighton’s Royal Pavilion built for Prince George (1762-1830), the hopelessly profligate son of King George III who is best remembered as the Prince Regent after he took temporary charge of the throne when his father suffered bouts of insanity. At George III’s death, the Prince Regent became George IV. Prince George was a self-centred spend-thrift who was a drain on national wealth and whose father thought that money paid by the government to ease his debts was “a shameful squandering of public money to gratify the passions of an ill-advised young man.”

All these mentions of the name George reminded me of another George, our British Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr George Osborne who is currently trying to devise ways of cutting the nation’s gigantic deficit which was incurred, in case we forget, by those profligate bankers who gambled the nation’s prosperity for their own short-term gains even though our modern George is trying to convince us that it is all about the excesses of the welfare state.

I am sure that it is unfair of me to remember Mr Osborne when thinking about the ghastly King George IV – maybe it is something about that sneer that they both have in common. Or is it their well-known weakness for champagne parties with the stinky rich?

The bloated king went unmourned to his grave and Mr Osborne, as quoted in the press today, is showing some signs of fear that he too is about to become a much hated figure. By concentrating his deficit cutting on the welfare state, he knows that he will anger a lot of people including those middle class families on over £44,000 a year who will no longer be eligible for child benefit. This seemingly odd way of rewarding the well-off with welfare benefits was introduced in the spirit of avoiding the means test and its consequent indignities and inequalities. Other spending “savings” concern the bottom strata of our society – all those people whose lives are financed by the state through unemployment, disability or other payments. This area of public spending is, of course, enormous and open, like all other schemes that involve money, including taxes, off-shore or on, company dividends and banker’s rewards, with abuse.

An ambitious new re-working of these systems of payment is about to be launched and Mr Osborne has expressed the rather optimistic hope that he can “keep the British people together as we go through this.”

Let’s go back to my bus stop in the rain outside the Prince Regent’s scandalous palace. The rain had caused “severe traffic disruption” according to the information board that notified us of all the bus cancellations. I could have caught the train back to my home town of Lewes, a fifteen minute journey, but something about this chaos drew me in. It took me three hours to get home and most of the time was spent under my umbrella with a group of aggressive people huddled together in misery.

It was midday when I arrived there and already there was an incident developing between a group of jeering teenagers with tattooed necks and spots and an angry red-faced man who was draining the remains of a beer can that he had found in the litter bin.  Not far away, an over-weight girl who could have been no older than, say, twelve, but who was dressed as a prostitute in the modern style of girl’s childhood fashions. She was shouting into her mobile phone: “What? bottom of what? bottom of what? I can’t f****ing hear you.” This continued as she boarded a bus that signalled it was going to the “Universities.” I don’t really care about swear words but it was distressing to pick up the intense aggression from this child.

Another bus arrived and a middle aged woman on crutches with a shopping bag and a bus pass ran to get on – she too muttered obscenities in her panic to get on the bus.

Then a thin young woman with an extensively pierced face,  came and stood next to me. she too was on her mobile phone and she was shouting. “When I get home, I am going to f***ing turn the place upside f***ing down until I find out who f***ing took my cigarettes this morning. If I find out who did it, I will f***ing kill them.”

The mood of angry aggression was unrelenting and I thought of those people again this morning when I read George Osborne’s words. He needs to know that there is real anger out there. Being poor, without hope and depressed is nothing to smirk about.

The new coalition government will need all of Nick Clegg’s liberalising skills and, I guess, David Cameron’s old-fashioned patrician kindliness, to temper George Osborne’s single-minded, no alternative policies of social reorganization in the guise of deficit cutting.

Maybe one of the Milliband brothers, I forget which, was right at last week’s Labour Party conference, when he said that Labour needed to end the class war not fight it. If this government can’t appeal to the most deprived, depressed and angered sections of our society, there will soon be a lot of people who will be shouting into their mobile phones? “I want to f***ing kill them!”

I was very happy, like those middle class characters in Dickens who retreat from grimy London to live happily ever after in the suburbs, when I finally got back to the gentile liberal environment of Lewes – I felt guilty about it too.

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