Who uses the word diddling these days??

‘Paying cash in hand is ‘diddling the country’, says HMRC’s Dave Hartnett’. I had to read this headline twice to make sure I hadn’t miss read the word diddling.

Diddling is the sort of word I would expect some cutesy 40 something female journalist to use when writing about the book keeper for the local WI being caught fiddling the petty cash. Mr Hartnett might be really good at counting beans, but his use of words indicates somebody seriously out of touch with the real world.

Trying to convince us that tackling the black economy (apologies to the PC Brigade for using a time honoured term), in the same week the boss of HSBC is given a £963,000 bonus for not being as crap as his predecessors and the Daily Telegraph prints a table of how HMG spends (squanders) our money, is a perfect piece of convergence. As such, it is certain to make Mr Dave ‘diddling’ Hartnett look like an even bigger plonker than he already does.

Where there’s blame there’s a claim!

It looks like, having accepted (on our behalf?) that all the troubles of the world are the fault of the British, or should that be just the English (devolution and all that) David Cameron is now determined to use taxpayer’s money to fix things.

Apparently, whilst Pakistan is busy spending £1billion on submarines we, the taxpayers, will be generously giving them £650m of our money, so that an extra 40,000 children can go to school.  Nothing wrong with kids getting an education, but can their government please do it with their own, obviously plentiful, cash.

It’s almost a perverse form of the no win, no fee system we have in this country, except that these ‘victims’ don’t have to prove anybody is guilty (call me Dave’s already done that) or even put in a claim, in order to get a nice big payout.

Closer to home, the taxpayer will be hit, along with all the other burdens being imposed by increased taxation, increased NI, government sponsored inflation, increasing food prices, etc, with a further cost in the form of a carbon tax on energy companies.  Apparently this slipped in under cover of the rest of the Budget, compliments of George Osborne.

This will add hundreds of pounds to the average energy bill, as the companies will seek to pass it on to consumers.  This tax, which will be unique to the UK, will not only hit ordinary people in the pocket, it will have a direct impact on the competitiveness of British businesses, just when many are struggling to survive.  It would seem that whilst the rest of the world suffers natural disasters, our government have decided to be proactive and create its own.