I got into the habit of listening to national budgets during my brief period of exile in Britain, at a time when I was a postgraduate student there. This is partly because of the fan-fare attached to the presentation of the budget by the Chancellor to the British parliament. Weeks before the event, the newspapers were awash with speculation as to the character of the next budget and It appeared as if all the serious discussions on the three available television channels at the time had something to do with the intriguing subject of the budget. Days before the big event, every little comment about anything at all by the Chancellor was eagerly seized upon and minutely dissected just in case it had something to do with the upcoming budget. The budget was prepared or rather, was put together by the office of the Chancellor, of course with relevant inputs from all ministries making up Her Majesty’s, as it then was, government. Each government spoke to the budget from basically, an ideological point of view with the Labour Party leaning closely to the left of the political spectrum and trying as much as possible to secure a few crumbs of comfort for their constituents, majority of who, at least in principle, were card carrying members of the working class. The other party, the Tories were of course entrenched, some of them truculently so, to the right of the political spectrum and was interested in winning economic concessions to their more privileged supporters whose primary interest was to shore up as many of their class privileges as they could without alienating the majority working class too much. Both sides looked at the budget from their respective class interests knowing very well that their political fortunes depended very much on what the budget had to offer, with some of them losing power after a particularly disastrous budget presentation. In this regard the ousting of the short lived government of Liz Truss immediately comes to mind. Her more illustrious and one of her long lived predecessors in office, the Iron lady herself, Margaret Hilda Thatcher contacted rust poisoning and did not survive matters connected with budget matters long before Truss crossed the carpet from the left and became a born again Tory. There is no doubt that there is a lesson to be learnt about the British budget here.
Immediately after the Second World War, with the sounds of bomb detonations still echoing in the air above the country, perhaps the most important general elections in the history of Britain took place. With many of the war regulations such as food rationing still in place, the country went to the polls to decide how their country was to be governed for the next five years.
The outgoing government had been dominated by Winston Churchill of the Conservative party, the face and voice of Britain throughout the turbulent years of the war and without his combativeness and determination, the war would, in all probability would have been lost. On the other side was Clement Attlee, leader of the Labour party, a self effacing man ruled by his strongly held socialist principles which had helped him to climb the very slippery slopes of Labour party leadership over a period of many years. He might have grown to become the eloquent spokesman for the working class later in his life but he himself was born into considerable wealth and affluence. His father, a property owning barrister was a nailed on member of the upper middle class and his children were brought up more or less in the lap of luxury. It was from this position of privilege within a mercilessly stratified society that Attlee developed a social conscience and decided to pitch his tent with the suffering underclass of his society. In other words, he became a traitor to his class in all matters economic and political.
Having just won the war, Churchill must have been quietly if not deeply confident that his Tory party was going to win the imminent elections. He probably did not remember that almost from the beginning of the war and indeed for several years during the thirties, Britain was ruled by a National government which contained personnel from both sides of the political divide for the simple reason that the country needed the people in government to put their differences aside and make a spirited attempt to confront the myriad problems that stood between most of the people and their aspirations to a halfway decent quality of life. And this was at a time when Britain ruled nearly half the world whilst the vast majority of her citizens were trying to eke out a precarious existence most of them working like moles extracting coal from seams reaching more than a thousand feet under ground in order to eat. Not to eat to the point of satiation but just enough to fuel the drive, if one can call it that, to return to the coal face on each of six days a week in order to create fabulous wealth for the benefit and totally immoderate enjoyment of the entitled minority of people who were embedded in the very thin upper crust of a patently unjust society.
At this point a wise old bird chirped its way into my consciousness to remind me of the fact that my original intention was to write about the budget or at least, the issues surrounding the presentation of that budget to Parliament. I thought I should get back on track immediately but then, I reckoned that without an identifiable economy, there can be no budget, at least not one that could be described as viable and worthy of any reasonable discussion.
The point to be made here is that, beginning from the end of the First World War, to pick an arbitrary point in history, Britain was a real basket case, rather like Nigeria is today. The only point of departure between the two countries being the quality of those selected to provide leadership. Britain was fortunate to have a steely man of principle in Clement Attlee whilst Nigeria cannot boast of anyone that can stand on a pedestal beside him. The driving force at the heart of our rulers is cold and calculating avarice standing between them and a capacity to provide selfless service. The British economy of the time worked very well for a few people in the same way that today, the so called economy of Nigeria is working only too well for only a handful of Nigerians who are totally oblivious of the precarious existence of the battered majority of their compatriots.
To return to the British general elections of 1945. The senior partner in the war time coalition government, the Conservative government was confident of winning and all objective indices pointed to that probability. But fortunately, there was an alternative unlike in contemporary Nigeria where the alternative is between Twiddledee and Twiddledum. Against frightful odds, the Labour Party won and through legislative means and her control of the power of the economy, changed the face of Britain forever. It was that government which held power for only five years that built the foundation of the modern British society that is now irresistibly attractive to hordes of Nigerians seeking the green pastures that elude them in the unfortunate land of their birth, the land in which their grandfathers are buried for all time.
It was the Attlee government that provided the social security system that has tried to give all the people of Britain some access to whatever wealth their country can put within the reach of her citizens however rich or poor. They did this without changing a comma in the British constitution which in any case is unwritten but very powerful and effective as an article of societal regulation for all that. Here, our governments are held, bound hand and foot by a bastard document prepared by dummies whose only excuse is that they were caught in a cloud of ignorance as they wrote it. Our constitution is plainly bad but for all that, it can be made to work for us provided that our motives are driven by sincerity of purpose. The deafening calls for constitutional amendments is no more than a distraction from doing the work of government. Take the example of the budget. Every year as stipulated by the constitution, somebody presents something called a budget to the nation knowing fully well that the provisions of the budget are to put it mildly, fictitious. As expected the dishonourable opposition both inside and outside the houses of legislation oppose every aspect of the budget only because they think that that is what they are expected to do. The budget is presented but it means little or nothing to that proverbial man in the street who is only interested in finding some food to tide him and his unfortunate dependants over for a few days. In the meantime, the budget informs him that the food to be consumed in Aso Rock for the next one year will cost the tax payers of this country billions of Naira. It must make that poor man on the street wonder if they do anything but eat on the fabled corridors of power in the bowels of the lair in the belly of Aso rock.
I was interested in the contents of the British budget because it meant something to the way the people in Britain lived their lives. Because of the budget, the man in the street could start to pay more or less tax, pay more or less for the beer he drowns his sorrows in or the cigarette he smokes himself to hell with. The contents of that famous briefcase from which the Chancellor dramatically pulls out the budget in Westminster will have a significant impact on his life over the next one year. In Nigeria, the budget means absolutely nothing. It is no more than a guarantee of more suffering in the coming year. Let nobody talk to me about any budget in Nigeria as I have no time for horse manure.
