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The dreams of two middle-aged Scots have been vying for attention on YouTube this week. It's been a desperately unequal contest.
Talent show contestant Susan Boyle has attracted over 40 million viewings for her rendition of "I dreamed a dream" on Britain's Got Talent.
Chancellor Alistair Darling, as of Monday morning, had pulled in all of 640 hits for his official Budget Day trailer, self-consciously styled on the lines of BBC4's satirical The Thick of It.
It's not only the numbers that make a stark contrast. On the one hand we have a person who, for various reasons, had missed out on many of the things in life that most of us take for granted. On the other, the second most powerful member of the Cabinet, backed by all the resources of the Whitehall media machine.
But whereas hope triumphs over all expectations in the Susan Boyle clip, Alistair Darling appears to be trapped in a nightmare. He mumbles his lines and the stylized production doesn't allow him to talk directly to the viewer.
The best offer he can make is that "activity" may double over the next 20 years. Great if he means fleet sales. Not good if the activity he has in mind is still looking for the first green shoots of recovery.
Which, given the breathtaking scale of the financial mess the Chancellor has largely inherited from his predecessor, is what he might have meant. Even as the Treasury posted its supposedly upbeat message on YouTube on Monday, the mainstream media was speculating that the Budget will have to impose Government spending cuts of £15 billion and reporting that a scrappage scheme was still only 'being considered'.
By the time the time comes to hand out £5000 incentives for buying electric cars or the need arises to pump billions into generating renewable energy to power them, who knows whether the money will actually be there?
No wonder the Chancellor's resolute expression disappears almost instantly during the closing two seconds of the clip and is replaced with that of a man who's suddenly got very little to look forward to.
Perhaps someone should cheer him up by getting Susan Boyle to sing the lyrics of "I dreamed a dream" for him.
Then again, on second thoughts, perhaps not:
But there are dreams that cannot be
And there are storms we cannot weather
I had a dream my life would be
So different from this hell I'm living
So different now from what it seemed
Now life has killed the dream I dreamed.
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