The most inventive period in anyone's life is when disaster strikes.
Whether it's divorce, disease, or impending electoral doom, it's the time when we start doing the maths that will make it all okay. An erring spouse with £200,000 cash will claim his former wife's £200,000 debt is "the same". A patient will convince themselves a 10% chance of survival is good odds, while a 10% chance of death is quite unlikely.
And in Westminster this week, the Tories think a tax cut in the Autumn Statement on Wednesday will keep them in power, because otherwise things are just SPIFFING.
To a Tory, a tax cut means "great, more for ME". And you need to start thinking like that too. Because when you look out of the window to see cracking roads, crumbling schools, and a collapsing NHS, and someone says "tax cuts", what it means is "great, more for THEM".
As reported today in the Mirror, campaign group Led By Donkeys has discovered that not only does Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt have a multi-million pound fortune of his own, a £150,000 salary and free Westminster flat, but he also owns 7 buy-to-let properties with his wife and has just put up the rent by 18%.
That's almost double the rate of inflation and 3 times the average rent increase nationally. But he says it's ok, because it goes to charity, although he won't reveal how much, or when, or which charities.
When he stands up on his hind legs to announce ANY kind of tax change, he'll personally benefit more than most listening. He'll make a fortune if he cuts income tax, corporation tax, or dividend tax. As someone who's registered interests in a portfolio of shares and partly-owns an Italian holiday home and London office, he'll benefit from any cuts to air transport taxes or property taxes. As someone on £150,000 a year, he'll save if National Insurance or higher rates of income tax is cut, too.
It'll also be Hunt who decides how to pay for whatever he cuts or borrows. So while he rakes it in, it'll be at the expense of YOUR bus service, YOUR library, YOUR dentist or GP, YOUR car that needs £1,000 of work after smashing an axle in another Tory puddle. His transport is paid for by the taxpayer, and it seems unlikely he's ever set foot in a library that didn't double as the headmaster's study.
It's almost clever, especially coming from a man who looks like a surprised duck whenever he's on telly. But what about inheritance tax? "The death tax", some would call it, "being taxed twice" others say. Except it isn't, because the dead don't pay taxes and it is instead a tax on about 4% of people whose parents are worth more than £1million who get taxed for an unearned windfall.
For Hunt, whose parents are still alive, any reforms to this would be beneficial. And let's not get into the many millionaires in Cabinet, the children of millionaires, the multi-millionaires who adorn the backbenches, and the multi-multi-multi-millionaire who lives in No10 Downing Street, when he's not in Chequers, and not in the constituency mansion with super new swimming pool, and not in California where he'd much rather be under all circumstances.
It is those people who have confected demands to cut inheritance tax, and told the public it's a tax on dreams. But it's just people saying "how dare you tax me, simply because I'm RICH?!" The best way to make dreams come true is to redistribute wealth from the 4% to the other 96%, and death duties are the best way of doing it without taxing the rich more while alive.
Every tax they take, every move they make, will be paid for by you.
Not just in announcing a headline-grabbing cut in the hope of shutting up Liz Truss. Not just in a welfare state that after a pandemic we're more in need of than ever before, and not just because after 13 years of salami slicing the public sector we're losing our own fingers with every successive cutback which makes the problems worse, the costs greater, and the long-term impact more serious.
They will make you pay for it in every possible way. With your sanity, because this isn't money in your pocket so much as the playground bully giving you a penny back for every £1 they thump out of you. With your patience, because they're already talking about another leadership election. And with your health, because thanks in part to chiselling private landlords like Jeremy Hunt everything still costs more than it should, and homelessness is increasing.
Thanks to their previous decisions to raise then cut National Insurance there's no funding for social care, and we're heading into another winter with trips, flu, and no widespread Covid vaccine for the first time.
The greatest lie the Tories ever told is that they can help "you" by making things worse for "them". Whatever help you feel you get is more than offset by the increasing number of things you need help with as a result. And the people who benefit the most from Tory ministers' decisions, over the past 13 years, has always been them: Tory ministers, not their voters.
From 2010 onwards the Cabinet was filled with millionaires, private schoolboys, people with less awareness of the problems in Dudley or Dover than the average lump of chewing gum you'd find stuck to a bus shelter. And they're now at the point of inventing maths and excuses in the hope that something, anything, will make them a smidge less likely to lose the next general election, which with a rocky Prime Minister could be as little as 6 months away.
They sold us austerity once already, and it made everything worse. When they try to sell you prosperity, remember it's their last desperate grab at a hopeful-looking tuft of grass as they tumble into the political abyss where they belong.