I was sitting in the garden reading Ed Balls spell out how Osborne is steering the good ship Blighty into economic oblivion and marrying this up with the grinning, evil sneer of the chancellor and it dawned on me what is happening in 2011 not so Great Britain. George Osborne is playing roulette.
No other country in a deficit is following in our example; many moderate economists are jumping on the doom and gloom bandwagon and we're all waiting for the country to slip its moorings and sink into the North Sea. However, there are a number of radical economists who think we're doing the best thing and a smaller number who seem to think we're not suffering enough. What if they're right?
Osborne has nothing to lose, has he? He's inherited a treasury that's so far up shit creek with its chocolate paddle that everybody was scared of their own shadows and no one wanted to do anything. He's not exactly got a bucket load of ideas to play with as he takes the keys to #11; so he calls in his brains and does a spot of storming with them and comes up with two scenarios - slow and steady - a Labour approach which will have him remembered as the chancellor who slowly steered Britain out of recession, oh is that the time? Or Super O, the radical chancellor who said 'fuck this, we're going blow this mother off the map'. The John Shaft of British politics comes in, gets radical on yo ass and if it works he's the person everyone remembers from this coalition of doom. If it fails? Well, he's just another of Cameron's cronies who had a go and buggered the country just a little bit more.
Osborne is in one of those no-lose positions, which is probably why him and that smug little cock Danny Alexander always look so full of themselves - political history has a tendency to breeze over component parts of failed governments. I'm just surprised no one else has noticed...
