This New Year cartoon by Phil Disley from The Guardian uses the recent floods in the UK to illustrate the coalition government's economic difficulties (Schrank had a very similar cartoon in Sunday's Independent).
Life-jacketed Prime Minister David Cameron (in the guise of Britannia), Chancellor George Osborne, and Work and Pensions minister Iain Duncan Smith are drinking champagne in an inflatable dinghy. They are paddling the boat with silver spoons, a symbol of inherited wealth and privilege. In the boat with them is a giant (capitalist?) pig (or piggy bank) dressed in a pin-striped suit, stuffed with bank notes, and smoking a cigar.
The title of the cartoon - "Forecast—a right pig's ear" - uses an English idiom to describe the country's economic prospects (though the word 'forecast' can also refer to the weather). If you describe something as a pig's ear, you mean that it is a complete mess or muddle (see The Phrase Finder for the origin of this expression). Right can be used, as here, to emphasize a noun, usually a noun referring to something bad. • He gave them a right telling off.
The message of the cartoon seems to be that the UK is run by a government of the rich, for the rich. Cameron's "Happy 2013!" is, of course, ironic, and all around the boat (common) people wearing the face of the figure from Edvard Munch's The Scream are drowning—a symbol of their economic and social plight.
