MORE AUSTERITY TO BE ANNOUNCED

There are yet another £16 billion in spending cuts to come (so shortly after the daft budget in which Osbum got everything wrong). The Treasury has ordered government departments to save another 5% of their budgets as the economy continues to go down the sink.

Danny Alexander will be warning us all (aren’t you glad we’ve got him and his financial genius?) of the need for even greater austerity measures today as he tells all departments to put aside more money. 

"These new controls are not just a tweak to the Whitehall machine," Mr Alexander will say according to advance reports of a speech he is set to make to the Institute for Fiscal Studies today. "They are another signal of our unwavering determination to deliver the fiscal consolidation we promised. When we look at the mess Britain's finances were allowed to get into, we say: 'never again'."

Never again? Funnily enough, that’s just what we were thinking, Danny

I wonder if this even greater austerity will be hitting the Westminster glitterati in any way.

I mean, will Lords’ allowances go down? 

Will canteens, sorry dining rooms, be subsidised less? 

Will bars start charging commercial prices for the drink that they clearly all consume in such vast quantities (how else to explain the drunken way the whole government operates)? 

Will MPs’ pensions reduce in line with the devastation of ordinary people’s pensions (and lives)? 

Will some of the expense of the Jubilee be reigned (see what I did there) in?

Will some of the frills for the Zil class at the Olympics be cut? 

Will they reverse the cut in the 50% rate of tax? 

Will they sell the crown jewels to some Chinese, Arab, Indian, Brazilian or Russian trillionaire and spend the money on infrastructure renewal?

Will they admit now that Britain is too wee, too poor and too stupid to have nuclear weapons and sit as a permanent member on the security council?

Nope? None of these? Thought not.

But, in an admission that the London executive is worried that Whitehall will be unable to keep spending down to the new levels of austerity, all departments will from now be required to report their figures to the Treasury on a monthly basis. (Not that Dan doesn't trust the useless cabinet members or anything, you understand.)

I would say that the UK is a bankrupt state as well as a bankrupt idea. Let's start splitting it up now, so that Scotland can deal with the financial pressures of the 21st century with a proper finance minister at the helm. I'd trust John Swinney any day over the buffoon at number 11. If we had been left in his hands, I suspect that, like Iceland, we'd be well over the worst of this.

(Click on illustration to enlarge.)