Make the most of your poverty, folks

If any of you have been feeling the pinch in these difficult financial times, you'll no doubt be comforted by the words of Dominique Strauss-Kahn (right), the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, in his closing statements at a conference in Zurich last Tuesday. "Crisis is an opportunity," he said, explaining that the recent economic climate offers a chance to "strengthen the system and increase its resilience to recurrent crises."

Crisis in an opportunity? Well, it probably is for the likes of him and the IMF - and anyone else who does well out of capitalism. For the vast majority of the Earth's population, economic crisis is an opportunity to experience unemployment, crap food, marital break-up, explaining to children why it is they can't have a Nintendo Wii for their birthday even though Jamie next door has one and a Playstation 3, drive a wreck, massive and crippling overdraft charges, lost sleep over mortgage repayments, bailiffs, homelessness and, in some cases, suicide.

Oy vey - fat cats, eh? Really no idea about the lives of 99% of humanity whatsoever.

Dodgy Git Of The Week

Yet another tricky decision this week - and to think we thought this'd be an easy way to fob readers off with a story that'd require absolutely no effort on our behalf whatsoever! It's been yet another good week for Dodgy Git spotting even though it's gone a bit quiet as far as new expenses revelations go - presumably the newspapers are concentrating on Michael Jackson for a bit and thought they might as well save the expenses stories for a bit till things have quietened down (and sales have tailed off).

George Osborne is in the news again, of course. Mr. Osborne has shown himself to be a Dodgy Git of very high standard, but he won the Dodgy Git Award (woo hoo!) a couple of weeks back for the very things that have got him the column inches all over again. Harry Cohen too has demonstrated himself to be a man given to extreme Dodgy Gittiness after he claimed the £100,000+ that he received for his second home forms part of his salary. Then there's Davyboy Cameron, who has been acting like the insincere little vote whore he is this week and pretending he likes gay people despite a past voting record that suggests very differently. But we eventually settled on...who else but the big man himself:

Prime Minister Gordon Brown!

Gordon's PMQs this week will remain famous forever because of one little statement:

0% growth

Hansard will no doubt record what followed as an interruption, but it's obvious to anyone who watches the video that what it means is "The entire house fell about the place, laughing their heads off at the fool. It's lucky this wasn't the Lords because a few of them are getting on a bit and can't handle excitement of this type." One of the funniest bits is the look on new Speaker John Bercow's face as he tries not to join in with the merriment. What could he have meant? Did he - as Harriet Harman tried to claim on Thursday night's Question Time - genuinely mean to say "0.7%?" He's been promising us for ages that the economy will soon start picking up and his party will increase spending, rather than decreasing it as the Tories have been claiming pretty much non-stop (honestly, they've been going on about it so much you wonder where they've found the time to shovel in the caviar and lobsters that they live on at the tax-payers' expense). Is it possible that, once he was up there in front of the packed House, he was unable to provide figures in support of his promises and, so desperate was he to avoid admitting there will in fact be no increase (and to avoid the dreaded C word*), he thought he could get away with using transparent bullshi...jargon to befuddle our inferior non-Prime Ministerial minds? Gordon, please - only the Dark Lord Mandelson himself can pull off absurd nonsense of that calibre! Anyway, we're choosing to go with the latter; and just for having sufficiently steely balls to even think about trying his luck with that one, Gordon gets the award.

Gordon's had a tough couple of months, and to top it all off this week some teacher's pet of a Tory swot only went and grassed him up for getting ink on the Dispatches Box. We hope that winning this prestigious award will help put a smile back on those cheeky little Scottish chops of his.

*Cuts.

Recession still not over, despite Government reassurances

Cast your minds back to last year - remember Gordon and Alistair reassuring us that the economic crisis would all be over by July? Those newspapers that then supported the Government (ha! Good times, eh Gordon?) made a bit of thing about it all, hinting heavily that since Mr. Brown and Mr. Darling are both economists (Brown was Chancellor of the Exchequer prior to becoming PM and so he can be expected to know at least a little on the subject even if he did study history at univeristy, Darling still is) we could all sleep easy in our beds, safe in the knowledge that the two Parliamentary experts couldn't possibly be wrong.

Do Gordon and Alistair need to go back to school for some GCSE Economics classes?
Or are they just a pair of lying scumbags?

But they were - that was a bedtime story and what's more, that great big credit-crunching monster under the bed is just beginning to feel hungry. Here we are, less than 24 hours from July and guess what's happening? Green shoots of economic recovery? Hell no - it's been announced today that the UK economy shrank by 2.4% in the last quarter. That's the biggest decline in over half a century! Just last week we were warned that whereas the rest of the world will soon start seeing improvements, it's likely to get worse here. Unemployment looks set to rise again, so that soon 1 in every 10 people will be scraping by on whatever laughable amount people on the dole get these days. Now the OECD, who say that Britain is in the grips of what it calls a "severe recession," are warning the nation that our economy is going to shrink by around 4.3% over 2009 as a whole. The pound is so weak compared to the Euro that if you decide to nip over to Calais this year you won't even be able to buy the kids some of those weird French sweets, never mind load up the car with cheap fags and wine - assuming your car hasn't been repossessed, that is.

The UK's national debt currently stands at £8.5 billion in May (it was £1.8 billion for the same month in 2008), which has led Standard&Poor's to alter the country's credit rating from "triple-A stable" to "triple-A negative." Any triple-A rating is good, but the new designation means that should the nation need to borrow money, it won't be handed over with quite so much enthusiasm as previously. Think of it as the difference between a friend happily lending you £50 to see you through to the end of the week with no questions asked, because he or she knows you'll pay it back on time with no excuses, compared to having to make grave promises that you'll pay it back when you say you will because they're worried you might start being funny about it - the friend lends you the money either way, but there's a big difference.

This change is an unignorable warning that things are not going well. In addition, any further downgrade could lead to the Treasury finding itself liable for higher interest rates when repaying future borrowing.

So, far from coming out of recession as promised, it seems rather as though we're in a bit of a tight spot and the walls are closing in. Could it be that Gordon and Alistair don't know what they're talking about, or were they just bullshitting us all along?

Prince Charles feels the pinch

Many people, suffering from the effects of the current global economic crisis, are probably wishing that they were so rich they could continue enjoying the lifestyles we all got used to during the years of plenty - which in some cases included luxuries such as being able to feed your children, having a house to live in and other similar decadence. But even the very rich feel the pinch and are forced to reduce their expenditure if they are to make ends meet - even the Royals.

Charles has proved that he is truly a man of the people by holidaying in this tiny Highlands cottage during the recession.

The Prince of Wales - as ever - wishes to be an example to us all, one suspects: he and Camilla slashed their personal spending last year. They spent just £6.2 million on staff, £527,000 on entertainment and a mere £65,000 on their gardens (possibly by asking the plants to stop eating so much).

Charles has an annual income of over £19.5 million of which £3 million comes the tax-payer and most of the rest from the Duchy of Cornwall. Yet despite these vast amounts, he managed to spend half a million pounds less last year (bringing the total to just £1.7 million) by introducing a range of cost-cutting measures such as holidaying at his tiny Scottish cottage Birkhall - just like normal people do - rather than flying off to Switzerland for skiing trips. Both he and Camilla have regularly been seen wearing outfits they have previously worn, and are believed to get them from Primark - both are regulars at the discount clothing chain's sales where Charles is often seen bulk-buying socks and Y-fronts.

To save money, the Prince has been wearing Primark Y-fronts rather than his usual custom-made pants which are embroidered with his crest.

Camilla even went as far as to sacrifice her annual sailing trip around the Greek islands, which as we are all no doubt aware would be an almost unthinkably hard thing to go without. The couple also reduced numbers of staff, many of whom may have found it difficult to find new jobs in the difficult employment market and as such will no doubt be taking the Prince's example to heart and reducing their own spending by similar amounts.

Sources at Clarence House claim that instead of the swan, caviar and truffles that many of us might imagine them to eat, the royal pair frequently nip down to Asda just before closing time to snap up bargains. "Charles came back pleased as Punch a few days ago," says one employee who wishes to remain anonymous so she won't have to join the laid-off staff in the dole queue, "he'd got a loaf of bread for 17p and six tins of Smart Price baked beans for just 10p each because they were dented. They had a lavish yet low-cost meal of baked beans on toast that night and even left a few slices which I took home to feed my little girl because the gas bill came in last week and I didn't have any spare cash left over."

A year ago, Charles converted his Aston Martin so that it would run on biofuel made from leftover wine - a handy tip for all the rest of us, who may often have wondered if we can do anything useful with those flat dregs of Krug after we've had some ambassadors round for dinner. His Jaguars, Audi and Range-Rover are also able to run on biofuel which he makes from waste aspic whenever he has had quails. However, even that was not enough for Charles who has since given up his beloved classic Aston and now drives a 9-year-old Skoda which has had its internal combustion engine replaced with an electric motor.

It has also been revealed that the Prince's agents sold all of the Duchy of Cornwall's shares just prior to the stock market crash, converting them into cash and Government Bonds. Now, we do not want to suggest in any way whatsoever that this implies anything a bit dodgy. But it makes you think, dunnit?