Is It Really Too Much to Ask? Read Online Free PDF Page B

years of eating less and buying fewer electrical gadgets.
    I figured also that after we’d finished laughing uproariously at the plight of the Greeks, we’d realized that we, too, would be in for a similar period of austerity. But I was wrong, because so far as I can see, no one is prepared to change their lifestyle one iota.
    Let us examine the case of Nottinghamshire. The Tory-controlled county council and the Labour-run Nottingham council propose to shave a total of about £100 million from their spending and lose 2,000 jobs in the process. Have those affected reacted with a shrug of inevitability? Not a bit of it. They’re all working to rule, and their union is making Churchillian noises about going to war.
    It’s not just council staff, either. You’ve also got a lot of middle-aged ladies jumping up and down on village greens protesting about plans to close their local library and not listening when anyone tries to explain it’s all on the internet anyway.
    Elsewhere, tax workers were outside the Treasury because their office-opening hours have been cut and students in Glasgow were to be found waving banners over plans to lose eighteen staff from the university’s biomedical and life sciences department.
    Doubtless, the druids will be similarly angry after Danny Alexander told the Commons that a £25-million visitor centre at Stonehenge will not now be built. I don’t know how druids express anger but if Alexander turns up for work with a lot of warts on his face, I guess we’ll know.
    Whatever, the point is that no one seems to recognize the need for cuts in spending, and if they do, they don’t think they should be involved. So what’s to be done?
    One chap called the
Jeremy Vine
radio show last week to discuss the problem with David Cameron. In a thick Birmingham accent, he pointed out that if you took all the money from the richest 100 people in Britain, all of our problems would be addressed and the other sixty million people could carry on as before.
    Amazingly, Cameron didn’t think this was a very good idea, so the man from Birmingham came up with another one. The prime minister should work for nothing. And therein lies the problem. It’s impossible, really, to get people to accept the cuts when so many of them are bonkers.
    And because they’re bonkers, there can be no doubt that when the cuts do start to bite, there will be much wailing and gnashing of teeth, along with a selection of petrol bombs and much police brutality. We are, it seems, on our way back to 1979.
    Last week I suggested a way of averting this would be to cut off Scotland. But no one in power seems to be taking that idea seriously. So I have come up with another rather brilliant wheeze: register Britain as a charity.
    The last time I looked, British people were giving more than £10 billion every year to help those less fortunate than themselves. That works out at more than £200 for everyone over the age of sixteen.
    We put money in the slot to cure cancer, buy swimming
pools for wounded soldiers, build orphanages in Romania, help keep drug addicts off smack, improve living conditions in Gaza: the list is endless. We give so much to charities for the blind that there are now more guide dogs than there are people for them to guide.
    In recent months, I’ve bought pictures to provide music lessons for kids with learning difficulties, signed several rugby balls, supplied a boot full of dung to help keep my local town’s lido open and then I spent a night with Louis Walsh to raise cash for Palestine. I even bought the chef Richard Corrigan at one party and I’m damned if I can remember why.
    Then there’s
The Big Issue
. I don’t like it. I think it’s boring. But it is the only magazine that I get every week. Sometimes I buy the same issue three times. Why? When I read
Private Eye
, which I enjoy hugely, I don’t think, ‘Ooh. That was brilliant. I’m going to buy it again.’
    The reason is simple. We enjoy giving our