I don’t know what all the fuss is about. George Osborne is simply trying to ease the dreadful tax burden on the rich, who are being dragged down by the feckless poor and the disabled. This is exactly what he was elected to do by the 36.9% of people who voted for his party at the 2015 General Election. There’s no point complaining now.

Let’s not hear any nonsense about people paying their fair share. Rich people already pay way more than their fair share. The top 20% of households pay 50% of tax. The bottom 20% pay only 6%. The richest fifth of people give the government half of what they need. How’s that fair? The least you might expect is that the poorest fifth are grateful for it, rather than bleating on about having their benefits cut so that they can no longer afford to function. Anyway, according to the Institute of Fiscal Studies analysis, the top 10%[1] are only £260 per year better off. What’s that to a rich person? A meal for two without wine matching at Le Gavroche? Hardly worth bothering with. Whereas the bottom 10% are going to be slightly worse off because of cuts in benefits. And to them £260 a year is loads. That’s £5 per week more. That’s nearly enough to be able to afford to feed yourself as well as your kids, provided you confine yourself to beans on toast. So why didn’t George just save himself the aggro, leave out the middle 80% and just give the £260 to the poor instead of to the rich. There are just as many households in the richest 10% as there are in the poorest, though admittedly the paths between their front doors may be longer. Robin Hood would have approved. Even Jeremy Corbyn might have done on one of his cheerier days.

But if George is determined, as many of his critics have seemed to imply, to reduce the burden on Tory voters, and stiff those who were never going to vote for them in a month of paydays, then he could do so much better. What is the point of taxation anyway? That’s right – to fill the public purse. But what’s that for? Just to provide exactly the kind of services that these poor and disabled people keep bleating on about needing. Why not just get rid of the whole shooting match? Who needs a public purse anyway? The NHS is clearly always going to eat up every bit of money you throw at it, so you might as well close that down. Provided you’ve got enough money to pay your doctor and hospital fees, which any Tory voter must have, then it’s only any use at all in an emergency, and that’s just to scoop you off the floor and get you hooked up to a drip to get time to get a proper doctor to see you – you know, one who has enough self-respect to charge for his services. The same applies to education. Let’s face, it do the poor need educating? How many HNDs or whatever it is they’re called these days do you actually need to be a plumber, for God’s sake? Show me one person who has ever been poor, got a completely free education, and then ended up being something other than poor. It hasn’t happened has it. Well, it might have happened to one or two people, but they are really the exception that proves the rule. I’m not saying that there’s no point in education, simply that there’s no point in state-funded education. Frankly, the country simply can’t afford to do it well enough. Anyone who wants their child properly educated will pay out good money and get someone who actually knows what they’re talking about to educate their children, not have some PE teacher teaching them O-level Maths, for God’s sake, or a Cookery teacher showing them how to do Chemistry.

Then there’s Defence. What is the point in having an army, if whenever we send them anywhere to do anything decent in the world, we never hear the end of it? Hyde Park full of the great unwashed complaining that we’re intervening in matters that shouldn’t concern us – well, they jolly well concern us now, don’t they? And on that note, what’s the matter in having an army if the terrorists can just climb into a dinghy and claim asylum here, and because of the so-called EU there’s absolutely nothing we can do about it. All you need is a few Tridents running silent and deep, and you can send the squaddies home. That will also deal with the debt problem as well. No point paying off your debts if you don’t intend to be raising any taxes any time soon. Public order and safety? Well, we can easily deal with that, as I shall soon demonstrate. Transport? Can’t see why people should travel if they can’t feed themselves, for God’s sake.

Housing? Don’t get me started. If you can’t afford a house by now, you might as well not bother. Just rent. It’s easier. And what’s left of the pie-chart? Social protection. Social protection. Scroungers, in other words. Money to stop the poor from rioting, basically. It’s all money down the pan.

I say scrap all forms of taxation and all of your so-called social protection, and just let everyone fend for themselves. Anyone with any resources whatsoever will easily be able to put together a standing army just by offering the local plebs[2] a few quid to keep their sprogs fed, and we’ll be back to the good old days. Vassals. Serfs. Fiefdoms. It’ll be like Robin Hood and the Knights of the Round Table, again. Hurrah!

[1] I don’t know why these people can’t always talk about the same top or bottom percentages, but apparently they can’t. Must be a reason…

[2] not the disabled ones of course. They’ll have to make do with a begging bowl and a bell. It used to work. Up to a point.