Rumour and RESPECT

You remember the budget, right? It feels like it was about a year ago now, right?

Because, in a week full of such total stupidity and incredible incompetence in British politics, it's easy to start drawing comparisons between political farces and buses (You wait for one then lots come at once, if you genuinely needed that explaining).

Today, we led ourselves on a merry little goose chase around twitter and the Cabinet Office's press team as some bright spark managed to start a rumour that Francis Maude was resigning as Cabinet Secretary, after his advice to people to store some petrol in case of a fuel strike was taken a bit too far by one dim-witted individual who thought it a good idea to decant it in her kitchen beside her lit oven; the subsequent 40% burns come as no surprise. Don't get me wrong, I feel sorry for her - in the same way I feel sorry for anyone who manages to set them self on fire (cue jokes from various twitter politicos about this being a protest against an oppressive regime a la this bloke.).

As if one middle east reference made comparatively of political goings on in the UK wasn't enough, George Galloway managed to cause uproar by suggesting that his (not so) shock win in the Bradford West by-election was the "Bradford Spring". I can only assume this means France will be sending their air force to bomb Bradford? I'm not advocating bombing Bradford, but it'd probably make better TV than watching Ed Balls and Ed Miliband eat sausage rolls.

And this brings us to #pastygate. George Osborne's middle finger to Cornwall was the slapping of VAT onto hot baked goods in some sort of move reminiscent of ... well, being a complete idiot. Pastygate was born and nobody would shut the fuck up about pasties for 3 days. I hope George Osborne dies by drowning in pasties. It'd be a damn sight better than drowning in petrol. Oh wait. There isn't any of that left.

It seems that unions in this country are much more powerful than we thought. Just the mere suggestion of tanker drivers possibly maybe going on strike caused thousands of utter idiots to rush off to Esso to fill up their cars just in case there's a strike (of which they'd have 7 days notice anyway), all because idiot-in-chief, aforementioned Cabinet Secretary, advised that we all fill up our cars. Followed by some rather rambling ... ramble from Ed Davey, the Energy Secretary, who helpfully told us "The average tank is about a third full... if we can bring that up to two thirds full then we should be okay... so if your tank is half full you should fill it up to two thirds full and keep it somewhere in between that and a half full". Which was about as much use as being told by Michael Fish that there would "not be a hurricane".

Talking of old codgers from by-gone eras, we move back to George Galloway who managed to take Bradford West off Labour with a 10,000 vote margin in yesterday's by-election. This, I suspect, was in part due to how useless Labour's incumbent MP had been - but that's my off-the-cuff remark, not a detailed political analysis. Unfortunately for them, some people decided they were able to start providing twitter with evaluation and comment on the election results and where Labour had gone wrong within seconds of the results being announced. The problem with doing that is that it makes you look... quite stupid. I do wonder how much of his time cat-man will spend in the country, let alone his constituency, though. Of course, he won't be around for long - the constituency boundary review will see to that.

Oh, wait, remember the budget?

Remember the Health and Social Care Act?

Yeah, those things still happened.