"And for my next trick, Ladies and Gentlemen, I shall pull the entire NHS budget from this tiny red bag..."

On April 9th, Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown unveiled his latest brainchild, the ‘2003 Budget’. Like all previous budgets, it looks good on paper. Unlike previous budgets, the paper was a tenner which represented transport spending.

His speech was devoid of exciting and radical economic changes, surprising many pundits who had been expecting an important announcement. “My target for this year is to make people richer and inflation lower,” explained Mr Brown, “Whilst keeping my job and not screwing up the economy. Or at least keeping my job.”

Various taxes were tweaked, to the annoyance of members of society who used related products. “Daaamn Gordon,” said one car user of the 1.28p raise on petrol tax, “Bloody buggering bastard Brown,” alliterated a drunkard of the 1p and 4p tax increases on beer and wine, and “Cursed politician!” coughed one smoker, who was apparently more concerned that she would now have to pay 8p more per pack of cigarettes than that she would almost undoubtedly die a painful and premature death of lung cancer.

Bio-ethanol fuel taxes were cut by a whopping 20p, but no-one cares because no-one uses bio-ethanol.

Brown also announced that he would, in the short term at least, be increasing Government Borrowing. “From now on,” he grinned, “This government will do its best to borrow sensible policies from other parties.”

As to whether or not society at large will benefit from this new budget, pundits are split. Labour tax policies at the moment seem to favour the young, the old and the lazy. Pensioners in particular stand to receive wads of dosh, from an extra £100 ‘Winter warmer’ to be burnt on open fires nationwide, to a somewhat more esoteric scheme reducing so-called ‘bingo tax’. The deficit caused by abolition of this charge on people using the word ‘bingo’ will be made up for with new taxes on other similar words, such as ‘eureka’, ‘gottit’ and ‘pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis’.

Meanwhile, Britain’s average 2.4-children 0.5-parent family stands only to get a headache from trying to understand the complex financial jiggery-pokery going on here. Gordon Brown, however, is fully confident that he has a grasp of the whole economy. So, the only comfort for the ‘average family’ is that he’ll go down with it when it finally goes.