A few comments on last week's UK Budget Statement and the chaos that has erupted across the government as a result of it.

This budget touched directly on a number of the key themes of this site.

As regular readers will be aware, this site is here to cover the final crisis of Capitalism, brought on by Capitalism's uneven distribution of the money supply. This means that the State is left with insufficient money to carry out its modern functions, too much of that money being in private hands.

Western governments are currently trying to solve this problem by cutting spending. The alternative is a radically redistributive tax system targeted at the very wealthy - the employer class. As far as the ruling classes are concerned this second option is currently unacceptable, so governments are attempting to address their deficits entirely through reduced spending. They are finding out that this is far easier to say than to actually do because of the anger generated by any attempted cut.

Eventually governments will come to see a stark choice between implementing a radical redistribution of wealth or forcing through the cuts thay want to make regardless of public opinion, which will cause revolution.

The UK Budget Statement, which unravelled so spectacularly over the weekend, clearly demontrated these dynamics in action.

1) Once again we see the UK government attempt to reduce their fiscal deficit by cutting a service or benefit that has ingrained itself into the social fabric of the country. In this case, it was disability benefits but the story was exactly the same when they tried to cut Tax Credits or Pensions. Once again they have been forced to U-turn by the resultant public anger and bad publicity.

What this demonstrates, as with the previous examples, is that cutting government spending is a lot more difficult to do than it is to say. Conservatives in particular come in to government thinking that cutting spending will be relatively simple. They think they will just have to apply (as they see it) a little sanity, logic and competence to the spending structure and cut out all the wasteful incontinence of those who have gone before. As conservatives, they think, they are not prey to all the "silly, impractical, idealistic dreams of the left" and know how to manage money.

Once in government they find this picture to be a false one. Sure, there might be a bit of waste they can tidy up, a little bit of rationalisation that can be implemented, but the savings made from this are so small when compared to total government spending that they might as well be non existent. Particularly in the context of a fiscal crisis they can only make a dent in the deficit by cutting major services and benefits. So while in general saying to themselves "we will take an axe to government spending" sounds great (as it does to many voters) when it comes to doing so in detail they find it difficult (as do many voters)

Not only are cuts more difficult for politicians to implement in monetary terms, they are also more difficult in emotional terms - the Ministers concerned just do not anticipate the pressure they will come under from the public, their constituents, their MPs and the new and old media.