TODAY it’s Budget Day.
It’s also Shrove Tuesday.
What are you going to be giving up for Lent? Already a number of parents know what they’ll be giving up.
The bad news is everyone else may find out what they’re giving up has been chosen for them by the Council of Ministers.
But are we downhearted?
Well, yes, actually.
We need to find a way to make today’s Budget enjoyable.
So here we have Budget Bingo.
The way it works is you can draw up your own list of services provided by the government and then listen in to Eddie Teare’s speech and tick off each one as he announces it is being cut.
The first to get to 10 can shout ‘House of Keys’ and then weep softly in a corner.
You can vary the level of difficulty for yourself by deciding whether to compile a list of services that, perhaps, we can probably do without and see how many of those are identified, or if you want to, make it a bit tougher and instead identify some of the vanity projects our politicians have made us pay for over the years and see if they have the guts to drop those.
Obviously you can’t cheat.
We know what’s going from education.
It’s a pity, because who would have predicted that either the family library or the mobile library was seen as less important than a Manx language primary school? (To be fair they’re all more important than some of the things they’ll no doubt keep.)
Or who could have predicted that the entire nursery provision would be axed? Particularly when you look in last year’s Pink Book of Budget revenue estimates and see that the nursery service (£900,000 to £1m per year, apparently) costs less to run than some of the chief officers’ departments in other areas of government.
Here are a few suggestions of Budget Bingo cuts to be called out at the higher end of the difficulty scale.
• Get rid of a government department:
Yes, just a year after the much-vaunted revamp of government structure, in which we don’t appear to have seen too many savings, will the possibility of reducing the number of government departments actually be announced today? Would members vote for fewer people from their number on a higher wage?
• Halving of the number of local authorities:
Okay, it isn’t going to reduce the amount owed from public sector housing loans, but we suspect there’s rather a lot that could be saved in administration costs if we reduced the number of local authorities from the 24 serving our small island. Politicians have talked about this for the past 25 years. Never have they shown the nerve to push it through when there’s an election round the corner.
• No more roundabouts:
Ballakillowey cost us £250,000.
That’s just one example of a scheme that no one appeared to ask for. Find four per year, we can keep our nurseries.
• Slash members’ expenses:
No, not just incorporate the lump sum expense account into their wages (and we can leave the argument about the whether that’s a pay rise to another time) but reduce the £2.1m figure included in last year’s Budget for ‘members’ ‘fees and expenses’.
Get rid of it entirely, you could double the number of state-run nurseries to 22.
• Manx Museum and National Trust:
Would this source of pride see a reduction from the near £4m in net expenditure from last year? It’s an educational resource, the trust would argue, but so is the mobile and family library service.
• Reduce funding of the film industry:
Difficult to imagine what impact this could have as we’re not really supposed to have any idea what, if anything, it is costing us.
• Close a care home:
Oh, they’re already doing that. Nice one Government of National Unity, you can tick off the young and the elderly.
• Spend less time and money on attracting ‘directors’ wives’ to come to the island and more on the people who are already living here:
This is on the supposition in some areas of government that the mythical directors’ wife syndrome will concentrate on things like the quality of restaurants ahead of judging a society by how it educates its children and looks after its elderly.
Are these spouses really so vapid?
Anyway, there are just a few ideas for you to play Budget Bingo.
I had thought of doing a Budget Lottery instead, but it appears our government is doing that by the way it is choosing where to make savings.
So, what do you get if you win in Budget Bingo?
Nothing. We’re all going to be losers this year.