Number 172: Sammy Wilson presents himself as the voice of reason and sanity. And even worse, he carries it off.

Politicians who want the Spending Review changed to suit Northern Ireland are “living in cloud-cuckoo land”, Finance Minister Sammy Wilson has said.

He was speaking at a special debate at Stormont to discuss how the review will affect Northern Ireland.
…
While all parties expressed concern about the Spending Review, there was a marked difference in attitudes towards dealing with forthcoming cuts.

Nationalist parties emphasised the need for resisting the cuts while unionists maintained the situation had to be dealt with.

In a previous employment (surprisingly enough, in the public sector) a couple of us were having a discussion about the job market, and I may have mentioned that the public sector was unsustainably large in Norn Iron. This pretty much caused someone to not talk⁽¹⁾ to me for weeks. Apparently large parts of the country can’t take the simple fact that the public sector cannot, in the long term, be bigger than the private sector.

It’s good to see that quite a few of the political parties there still haven’t cottoned on to that fact, and believe in a divine right of free money being sent by London every year. Even when said money runs out, they bitch and moan, and then probably hold their breath until they’re sick.

Whereas Sammy Wilson, a true nutbar with all the likeability of a kick to the side of the head, is the one talking sense and telling people to get on with it. How did the world come to this?

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⁽¹⁾ – Yes, he stopped talking to me. Like we were small children and I’d stolen a crucially important piece of their Lego.