The real losers on budget day

While everyone was getting excited about what the Chancellor would be doing in the Budget to get the national debt down the banks were up to their old tricks.

Readers of Optician will have see the story about Gilco and its efforts to sell the business in last week's issue.

Readers this week will learn the full sad story of how the cost of the pension pot and the jitteryness of the banks conspired to put 30 people out of a job and see the lab closed. More galling still is the fact that it was the money generated by such manufacturing operations and the people who work in them that paid to bail the banks out last year. This created the debt problem that the country now faces and would have been uppermost in the bankers' minds when they cut Gilco off. So much for fairness.