Awake, bright morn!

​+The trouble with phrases like ‘hard working families’ is that their over-use by politicians wears them out (just like hard working families) so very often a variation must appear, like Nick Clegg’s abysmal ‘alarm clock Britain.’ Now it seems this week’s budget is going to be all about ‘strivers’ (struggle, strain are suitable synonyms), everyone is going to strive for growth, except of course those who have largely played out their economic usefulness and thus can be treated as a drain on the strivers. Can everyone be a striver? How would their rewards materialise? I guess one answer would be to put e.g. every manual labour job on piece rates. How many potholes did you fill today? How many bins did you empty? And particularly apposite in today’s economy, how many parcels did you deliver? And of course all this before you can claim your cruddy state pension at age 67 (or later). What will be the reward for all your striving, in Rachel Reeves’ macroeconomic world? More growth in the economy which accumulates more wealth for the already rich? One hopes there may be serious attention given to Britain’s increasing wealth gap in Wednesday’s budget. Certainly the rightwing press are in a tailspin over the slightest suggestion that the merest ounce might sliced off their burgeoning fat—to what extent will Reeves resist their selfish alarums? Anyway, one small benefit we may take from Wednesday’s budget is that all the seemingly endless and tedious speculation will be over and we will all be able to turn over and dream of striving.