The 2017 Budget which is about to be approved, thanks to Basque nationalist backing, can be summed up in the following fashion: incoming!

For example, the Government is going to increase traffic-fine tariffs by 25% but at the same time spend 21% less on road maintenance. You can deduce that the money from the road fines won’t be going on improving our deteriorating roads.

With these two seemingly conflicting points in mind, it is clear that the amusing claim that fines are levied to educate road users rather than simply being a form of raking money in, is going down in a shower of flames.

Moving on, with inflation climbing towards three percent, the news that pensions will rise by only 0.25% and education grants by 0.10% it is obvious that the purchasing power of pensioners is rapidly declining. The same goes for our education system.

During the worse years of the crisis it was the pensioners that bore the brunt and saved the day: on pawltry pensions these people took in their adult children and fed them along with their grandchildren. This is their recompenses, then.

To add insult to injury, the Government has decided to award national & regional MP’s a 1% increase to their salaries. In other words, those that most deserve to receive a percentual increase that will at least keep them level with the pace of inflation, will only received a quarter of one percentual point whilst our MP’s will receive an increase four times greater.

Would somebody like to write in and explain why our MP’s deserve any increase, at all, to their salaries?

The very people that were handsomely paid to efficiently run the country, but instead sat by and watched runaway property prices rocket and banks dish out completely insane mortgages, leading to so much suffering when the crunch came, are now to be rewarded for their incompetence. We’re talking about MP’s from all political parties, by the way.

But then again, what else can you expect from a government that belongs to the most corrupt political party in Spain since the reappearance of Democracy in the last quarter of the 20th century; a Prime Minister without even the most miniscule sense of honour enough to resign, and a Minister of Inland Revenue who allegedly favoured a private company – one he himself set up – with government contracts.

But that’s not all; the Minister of Justice in cahoots with the National Public Prosecutor, appointed an anti-corruption public prosecutor who had on three occasions shelved very obvious cases against the First Minister of the Madrid regional government.

Recorded conversations (the police tapped their phones) between top party figures show them openly gloat over how this anti-corruption figure will prevent a case against their party member going ahead. The said First Minister, by the way, is currently languishing in prison, as is 25% of the party’s top figures in that regional government.

When, against all his efforts, regional public prosecutors took the First Minister to task, he ordered them to drop the investigations – they rebel and he has to back peddle. Yet nobody resigns; not even the Ministry’s office cat!

So tighten your belts whilst our MP’s loosen theirs, and spare a thought for our forgotten pensioners who saved the Government’s bacon by eking out their monthly payments to feed three generations under one roof.

(News/Opinion: Government 2017 Budget)