Fictional people hit by Pre-Budget Report
As many other news outlets have done today, we ask the question: who were the winners and losers following Gordon Brown’s statement today?
Jack and Emma are a couple in their mid-thirties, who live in Surrey with their three children and a mortgage. Both are employed in high-earning jobs, neither smokes, but they drive an SUV and enjoy a glass of wine. They will lose out by £48.34p a year.
Susan is a mature student in her forties. She smokes almost ten cigarettes a day, prefers sambuca to tequila, commutes by bicycle and has no dependants, no close relatives, and nobody to hold her at night when the anxieties come back about the clowns. She will gain £15.20p a year.
Arthur and Madeline are in their fifties. They exist in a bungalow, and do not own a car. Arthur works in the village, barely five minutes walk from his front door, a walk he despises. He is a fruiterer, but his is a dying profession. Arthur spends an average of £40 a week on petrol. Madeline is oblivious. They will come to regret the £56.71 a year that they will never see again.
Lakshmi is a 63-year-old widowed grandmother of eleven, with no children. At times, as she stares out of the grubby window of her second-floor tenement, watching the cars slosh past in the rainwater features of the unmended road, she thinks back to her teenage years and the certainty she felt then. No, her dream of becoming a showjumping champion never came to be – oh, those guiltily procured and furtively scrutinised horse magazines of her childhood! – but she does not begrudge those alternate histories, always just out of reach, now that the placid vagueness of age is encroaching. In any case, she recalls with satisfaction the noises as she took revenge against the careless driver who crippled her horse four decades ago. She does not drink. She will experience no change.
Elijah is 37, and takes a little brandy. He drives a hybrid car to the Surrey headquarters of the telecommunications equipment firm he is a regional manager for, from which he takes home £50,000 a year. He smokes socially, and has a mortgage of £170,000. He regularly buys diesel for his colleagues as a gift, which they accept with puzzled good humour, because what they do not know is that he is an anthropologist from the year 3057 and that his true form is more squid than man. He gains £5.33.
Susan (not the same one) and Colin and Brianna and Markos and Susan (a third) live in a polyamorous cohabitation in Dorking, where they consume petrol. They like to throw fuel parties, at which everyone brings different fuels and smokes roughly twenty cigarettes covered in gin and fuel. One a year, they fly on a plane to FlamCon, the international festival of oil-based fuels. For her last birthday, Markos got Susan (third one) some crude oil, while Brianna staged a self-written play that climaxed in the fiery destruction of 40,000 tonnes of coal. They like to perform erotic acts whilst coated in soot and fuel. Their fanzine, Combustor, is written in charcoal and distributed by tank to over 1,500 subscribers, with a free fuel sample every issue. They are likely to feel an impact in their wallets.
Jim is an astronaut. The stars are so much brighter now.
Hank, an American, is married to Sajeda, an Iraqi woman. When he courted her, determinedly, Hank felt sure that once she got to know the real him, she would reciprocate his desire, and come to love him. But Sajeda, who after a lifetime of abuse felt pressured into accepting Hank’s advances, only finds him controlling and often brutal, and longs to escape. They have one deeply troubled child, who will need long-term round the clock care, and Hank consumes a vast amount of oil. They will lose roughly £237 a year due to the Chancellor’s removal of a loophole by which clumsy metaphors paid the lowest rate of income tax.
Jasper and Bruce are two gay hydrocarbon molecules, who live in plane fuel tank and have formed a civil partnership but have no children because they’re gay and chemically volatile and molecules. They lose £189.
