Disclaimer: I much don’t care for this bloke (picture: Guardian)

I’m not chancellor of the exchequer (I don’t even know when the chequer stopped doing whatever a chequer does, let alone when he/she deemed it necessary to employ a chancellor on their payroll) but I imagine it’s a tricky job. One of the main things you have to do is balance a big budget – one for the entire UK and it’s population. So pretty big.

Anyone who knows me will tell you that I’m awful at budgeting: it doesn’t matter how long you give me to examine my varying weekly income from my zero hour contract job (anywhere between 10 and 54 hours, or £80-£300 net after tax per week) I can’t budget for toffee!

I find the whole thing tricky as heck. I have no idea how much I spend on food a week, nor transport, nor luxuries like water and electricity. It certainly seems as though it might be too much, since this week, after paying my bills a week late and borrowing £30 to get out of an unplanned overdraft, I have only £24 to my name, which isn’t even mine, or actually money. My bank balance is –£1,976, which, bundled together with an outstanding loan on another account, brings my net worth to around -£7,000. It’s safe to say Forbes aren’t going to be hassling me for me an interview anytime soon.

So in other words, I am in no real position to criticise someone else in a job which I’m clearly not qualified to do. Unlike Gideon Osborne, I do not possess 2:1 bachelors degree in Modern History from Oxford, but a 2:1 bachelors degree in Politics and Philosophy from Sussex – something that in 2011 cost £27,000 but is of course today, in real terms, worthless.

But as hard as it might be for someone as assuredly qualified for the job as Osborne is to balance the nation’s books, even a lay, less-than-nothing person like I cannot help but feel that he might’ve had alternatives to what he has eventually settled on. The general take on what he’s presented is that if you’re doing alright, then you’re going to do even more alright, but if you’re not doing alright, then you are going to do even less so. Soz!

. @George_Osborne are you adding an asterisk to that title: (*or, how to screw 9 million poor people without taking your suit off)?

— Marc Sweeney (@marcsweeney) July 8, 2015

Naturally the people of the latter set and those that empathise with them for whatever reason, are a bit upset. They are told that the budget is for ‘hard-working people’ – a demographic that is increasingly difficult to define. On the basis of what’s been presented, a hard-working person does not work a minimum-wage, zero-hour or part-time job, does not attempt to raise a family, does not rent a home in the areas in which opportunities for work are concentrated, and most certainly does not attempt to lift themselves or their family out of poverty by claiming some sort of benefit alongside their unpredictable, precarious employment. Stop trying to feed your children and put a roof over their heads you selfish, scrounging scum!

On the basis of Tory rhetoric, it would seem as though that if you’re not quite fitting into the definition of ‘hard-working person’ then it’s because you’re not putting enough effort in – certainly if you’re unemployed or not finding enough hours of work. That there are around 2 million people unemployed – with many more above that figure under-employed actively looking for better-paid work or more hours than they are currently offered – fighting it out for less than 500,000 full-time or part-time roles, does not dissuade the government from placing the blame on members of the public for having the audacity of being poor and finding themselves in a position where they need to ask for help. Presumably, they expect the remainder of plebs that don’t find employment to all become self-starting, small-to-medium business entrepreneurs in a country where massive, international corporations are handed large government subsidies to assure their stranglehold on the market. Good luck with your ventures guys and gals! Also, if you’re a child you’re not a ‘hard-working person’ either are you? So don’t expect anything from this budget to alleviate that poverty that you’re in – that poverty that won’t even be acknowledged soon.

I admit that my tone is perhaps overly cynical and my opinion overly biased to those who have less than fuck-all in life. To strike some form of balance, I should probably write a piece cheering on the figurative round of hand-shandies the UK’s rich have been served up today. Probably. But it’s hard to step outside of your own life experiences, upbringing and what you’ve been taught. Of course I – a precarious worker, struggling to make rent and find better employment, brought up by parents who only ever knew hardship and debt, who was told that you should look after people where you can and that unabiding greed in a world of want was ugly and immoral – will always side with people who feel the brunt of cuts in a government budget.  If I were of Gideon’s ilk – financially secure, privileged upbringing, a lifetime surrounded by rich, self-serving, solipsistic, trust-fund twats, told that profit is all and that being born out of a moneyed minge gives you a divine right over most of your country’s population – it’s a fair bet that I wouldn’t give as much of a shit as I currently do about what is happening.

Osborne is not without feelings – this is a man, after all, who wept actual tears at the funeral of Margaret Thatcher: real tears. Like it was his bloody grandmother or nanny (those two words mean two different things to you once your parents earn a certain level of income.) It’s not that he doesn’t feel emotion, it’s just that it’s certain things that set him off: show him the ragged, blood-drenched corpse of a fox and he’ll probably giggle and dance about flapping his hands with excitement; show him photos of a 18th century stately manor fallen into disrepair and he’ll probably choke on his own phlegmy sobs.

Coke can really make your eyes water sometimes.

A part of me still likes to think that the awful shower of bastards that currently represent a majority in parliament are only one Christmas Carol-esque night of revelation away from scrapping everything and lifting millions out of relative poverty. I don’t believe that they are inherently bad people, only people made bad. But the inevitable fact that this government’s budget will result in even more people made poor, people made depressed and people made dead, whilst a small privileged few roll about naked on increasingly large piles of cash, farting, faces smeared with foie gras, can’t do anything but pin me a little bit to one side of this debate. Sorry, it’s my upbringing at fault.