Today I listened to the British Budget with great interest like I do every year. And just like every year, I’ve come away having no idea if it makes sense or not. I know it makes little sense to me.

I can obviously judge whether this is good or bad for me personally, but am stumped when I wonder about whether it is a good budget for the country.

The problem is that no matter how much time I have spent studying politics and economics, it is not something I can give enough time to fully understand. The same goes for all policies. I sit on the fence on so much of politics because I see it as one giant experiment where nobody really knows the answers. Just a basket of informed opinions.

Instead, I have begun to judge politics more in terms of the personality of the politicians. What is their past performance like? Do they make convincing arguments? Do they spin the truth? Are they too radical? Are they prepared to backtrack on policies that haven’t worked out? Do they criticise others who do the same? How good are they at getting things done? How switched on are they to the modern world? And perhaps most importantly, how well are they able to answer questions on their proposals for policy change?

Whenever I’m on the fence about an issue, this is a helpful filter to help me decide whose policies I would like to back.

Unfortunately at the moment, nobody gives me confidence they know what they are doing with the economy, which is perhaps another reason the budget makes even less sense to me this year.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009 at 23:35 UTC and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.