BUDGET time is coming round again, a fact that I suspect is about as welcome to George Osborne as news of a lengthy appointment with the dentist.
At the best of times, Budgets aren't as much fun as they used to be. Multi-year planning frameworks and spending reviews mean a lot of the decisions have already been taken.
That, in turn, means the Chancellor and his advisers have to dream up gimmicky, low-cost, headline-catching items that ensure that the Treasury, not the Opposition, dominates the news agenda.
Last year, this gave us the unintentionally-hilarious series of post-Budget rows about taxes on pasties, caravans and charitable giving. Yep, they certainly dominated the headlines, albeit for all the wrong reasons.
On top of these problems, these are very definitely not the best of times. The economy drifts sideways, real earnings have been falling throughout this decade (more or less) and the Conservative Party has just lost out to the UK Independence Party in the Eastleigh by-election.
So the air is thick with talk of a last-chance make-or-break Budget at a time when, as noted above, room for manouevre is strictly limited by the planning framework and limited further by the fact that the Government has no money.
George Osborne is fortunate in that his accusers cannot agree on whether he ought to be spending more money, or less or the same, but on different things (transport projects, say, rather than welfare). He is unfortunate in that this incoherence increases rather than diminishes the impression that he is surrounded by critics, that they can't all be wrong and that therefore there is a case to answer, a case suggesting that the Chancellor is, to put it mildly, a bit of a twit.
There is very little scope to do anything much in his Budget speech on March 20, yet many of his colleagues are demanding the world. Yes, I think the dentist would be the better bet, and I speak as someone who turns into a cowardly wreck on hearing the words: 'Open wide.'
1) A trap of his own making
BUT before we feel too sorry for the Chancellor and his colleagues, remember that it is they who have got themselves into a position where their narrative (to use a word I try to avoid in this context) makes very little sense.
There are two axes of contradiction running through the Coalition's stance. One is that it cannot decide whether it is a radical, State-shrinking classical-liberal administration or whether it is the heir to Blair and Brown, keeping the post-1997 order going but with less money.
The other is that it cannot decide whether this is a genuine economic emergency or simple a pause in the triumphant onward march of the post-Cold War economy, the one where we borrow as much as we like, award ourselves endless new 'rights' at work and demand Scandinavian levels of public services in return for American levels of tax.
These two axes cross at the Treasury, and in the resulting X-shaped ambush the Chancellor and his colleagues risk being cut to pieces. Maybe they deserve it. But remember that the commander who marched them into this unpromising terrain was the First Lord of the Treasury, Mr Osborne's next-door neighbour David Cameron.
2) Cuts: a modest proposal
REGARDLESS, however, of the mixed messages that have plagued the presentation of the Coalition's economic case, there are going to have to be about £10 billion of extra cuts for the year 2015-2016. Defence Secretary Philip Hammond was first over the top, telling The Daily Telegraph yesterday that his budget had been cut to the bone and beyond.
Having spent my time as an economics correspondent assuming that the Ministry of Defence is a nest of squandermaniacs who high-five each other whenever a new piece of equipment goes over budget (i.e. all the time), I am in the unfamiliar position of agreeing with Mr Hammond, although I am too squeamish to contemplate his preferred alternative, which is to swing the axe at the welfare budget.
At which point, you start to run out of options. If you won't cut defence (or transport or the police and prisons) and you won't cut welfare, that leaves - in terms of big-ticket items - the public payroll.
Firing civil servants may not be the most unpopular move available, but that does not make it a good idea. Civil servants buy food and houses, shirts and blouses - they add to demand. Sack them, and they won't be buying anymore.
So without having any overall plan for spending cuts, here is a potentially popular scheme that would show the Coalition is serious about (a) saving money and (b) liberating the citizen from the dead hand of bossy and useless State officials (excellent Tory and Liberal objectives).
Fire anyone involved in administering ideological objectives. Developed, first-world states don't have ideologies, beyond vague loyalty to one or two institutions that guarantee the survival of the political structure (the Queen in Parliament here, Old Glory and the constitution in the US). Governing parties have them, of course. But it is for those parties to propose those ideas to the electorate, using people they themselves have employed and are paying for.
So let's shut down the Government Equalities Office, end funding to all single-issue groups (whether demanding higher alcohol taxes or more 'children's rights') and deliver on Communities Secretary Eric Pickles's pledge to end 'government lobbying government' by banning the use of public money to fund demands for the spending of...more public money.
3) She spoke just like a baroness...
LADY (Shirley) Williams was on robust form in print yesterday morning, insisting a certain senior Liberal Democrat be given a fair hearing in relation to assorted allegations of wandering-hand trouble. Attagirl!
Then some sanctimonious personage called Baroness Crosby popped up on Radio Four to claim the UK Independence Party vote in the Eastleigh by-election was an expression of the lamentably regressive attitude of 'stop the world, I want to get off'.
Well, maybe. So, of course, was the creation of the Social Democratic Party in 1981, an attempt to ignore the unpleasantness of Britain's economic decline and assure the voters that the long Saturday morning of post-war prosperity would return just as long as the country was run by sensible people such as Roy Jenkins, David Owen, Bill Rodgers and Shirley Williams, alias the abovementioned baroness.
Thanks again for reading and enjoy the rest of the weekend.
Going South: Why Britain Will Have A Third World Economy By 2014, by Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson, is published by Palgrave Macmillan