Buddy Can You Spare a Grand?

Two stories grabbed my attention on this bright and sunny Budget Day, ‘UK suffers first signs of deflation’ and ‘Royal Mint privatisation closer’.

This is the stuff that makes the train of thought pull out of the station.

What if the deflation gathers apace and turns into hyper-deflation? Will we need coins, ergo, will we need a Royal Mint or are they going to mint £50 and £100 pound coins? Will £1 buy you 5 Euro cents?

The old man shaking his tin cup in the High Street may well be asking, “Spare a £1000 for a cuppa, guv!”

Turning back to deflation, the last time the UK was in this state was way back in 1960.

I guess that most working people now, wouldn’t remember those heady days, so to give an idea of the distance in time, Harold Macmillan was the UK Prime Minister, JFK was going through his election campaign in the US, nobody had ever heard of the ‘Beatles’, the whole country was waiting with bated breath to see the first ever episode of ‘Coronation Street’, which was transmitted in the December of that year, and yours truly was in the last year of his teens!

We survived that recession so I suppose we will manage to come out of this one alive.

Today’s Budget should prove to be the most interesting one in history.

If darling Alistair doesn’t give us some bad tasting medicine to get us through this, if instead he chases the populist vote with a few mamby pamby cuts here and meaningless concessions there, I think the best thing that Mr Brown can do for his Queen and Country is to give him a revolver and tell him to do the honourable thing!