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Britons will learn about their government’s budget on Wednesday, a day before Canadians learn about theirs. The British budget will not be pretty, but then neither is the British economy. The country is mired in a prolonged economic slump, with fiscal austerity beckoning for the rest of this decade. Worse, the British have plunged into yet another long bout of soul-searching about membership in the European Union that could culminate in an in-or-out referendum in 2017. If a weak economy and another spasm of energy-sapping introspection about Europe are not debilitating enough, the exact date in the autumn of 2014 for a referendum on Scottish secession is supposed to be unveiled in Edinburgh on Thursday.