FORENSICALLY, objectively it is time to advise readers, as I do in my column in today's edition of The Mail on Sunday, to get ready for Labour back at the Treasury. The Budget was a waste of space on an heroic scale, a pointless list of fiddly half-measures that will have no major impact at all on our economic prospects. If Labour does not blow it, then the next election ought to be in the bag.
Of course, the supposition that the Opposition will not throw away victory in 2015 takes us to the far frontier of the subjunctive mood of speech. To illustrate the party leader's talent for tactical ineptitude you need note only that he has given his backing to a State press regulator before it has started work, thus leaving the newspapers free (for now) to go gunning for him.
Still, my guess would be that Labour will get back, and that we will need to get used to Ed Balls at the Treasury. The big question then is whether he alienates his mates in the public sector trade unions at the start of his time in office (in order to reassure markets as to his 'soundness') or after a huge sterling crisis and gilt-buyers' strike about 18 months in.
That he will have to do so at some point is beyond question. As his Labour colleague Liam Byrne put it, there's no money left.
1) Cyprus: Ich bin ein, er...?
WHY on earth anyone thought it a good idea to let Cyprus join the eurozone is beyond me. The single currency area is supposed to be a unified economic space. Meanwhile, little Cyprus itself is divided into four jurisdictions: Greek, Turkish, British and United Nations (people actually live inside the 'green line' that keeps the Greek and Turkish Cypriots apart).
So this corner of the allegedly border-free eurozone is criss-crossed with frontiers of one sort or another. The zonal border actually runs through the capital in a sort of narrow-gauge replay of Germany in the Cold War.
Maybe President Obama ought to visit and say something such as: 'Today, in the world of freedom, the proudest boast is: "I am a Nicosian."'
Mm. Not quite the same, is it?
2) Nobody told us we could do that
AN intriguing piece of fall-out from the Cypriot crisis has been the imposition of emergency exchange controls to prevent capital flight from the stricken island. Quite apart from the hilarious prospect of a single currency zone one part of which cannot send money to any of the other parts, I thought capital controls were supposed to be impossible in the post-Eighties world of electronic transfer and computerised trading. Evidently not.
3) Yes! Or rather, no
FOREIGN visitors, I fear, must find our country deeply strange in many ways.
Forty-odd years ago, I saw a news item about New York taxi drivers who were happy to be paid by credit card. It all seemed rather daring, and unlikely to catch on here. Which it hasn't, really, although we seem determined to pretend that it has.
Many taxis apparently take plastic - until you try to pay in this way and are told that there will be a charge or that you ought to have told the cabbie at the start of the journey, or that the machine is not working.
The other day, I was in the back of a cab and noted the driver's window listed the cards that would be welcomed for payment: Visa, Visa Electron, American Express, Mastercard. Right next to a sign that read: 'We do not accept credit cards or cheques.'
Of course not. Silly me.
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.