Pop Goes the Weasel

Wee Nicky, who prudently avoided the public gaze during Daveybloke's characteristically smooth handling of the latest series of blunders, has now crawled out again to do a bit of finger-wagging. Clegg lectured his masters over their triumph at having somehow failed to turn the Olympic bounce in the economy into the same sort of trough as everything else: the recovery, it seems, is going to be "fitful", apparently because the poor, poor City of London can no longer afford to pay Liverpool's taxes.

Appropriately for the protagonist of a cautionary tale for children, Nicky the schoolmarm also mangled a couple of nursery rhymes into a convoluted economic metaphor, in order to explain to the infant public why the Bullingdon Club has to keep on kicking the vulnerable. It seems that a goose was laying a golden egg, but the goose came crashing to a halt when a merry-go-round stopped and broken Britain is now a sort of Humpty Dumpty who cannot be put back together. Therefore, "we need to fix the banks and all sorts of things", but what is actually required is a rebalancing of the whole economy, presumably because it was the economy that brought down the banks rather than vice versa. By golly, it is just such a rebalancing which Wee Nicky now hopes to achieve, instead of electoral reform, Lords reform, protecting the NHS, keeping us at the centre of Europe, keeping tuition fees down and so forth. His latest ambition is that the Bullingdon Club will leave behind a "radically decentralised country" in which, whenever the Chancellor wields the axe, local authorities will have the power to decide for themselves which groups of undeserving poor are most in need of chastisement.