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Sunday 6 July 2008

This was the Budget of a man trapped by the terrible profligacy of his predecessor

Fraser Nelson reviews the week in politics

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It says much about Alistair Darling’s predicament that he used his first Budget to win back a title once used to insult him — being the most boring man in British politics. His office had promised there would be no false scents, no attempts to deceive, no ‘rabbits pulled out of the hat’. The magician himself may have moved next door to 10 Downing Street — but the small print of the Budget exposed the extent of the damage wreaked before he left.

Not since Lord Howe of Aberavon moved to the Treasury in 1979 has a Chancellor inherited a worse situation. Like most countries, Britain has enjoyed an economic upturn in recent times. But instead of building a Clinton-style surplus during these fat years, Gordon Brown has spent with such recklessness that Mr Darling reported a deficit of £36 billion. This is, proportionately, the largest in the world save for Japan and Hungary. This is why Mr Darling had no choice but to deliver a dull Budget: there was, as David Cameron rightly said, no room for manoeuvre.

Yet for all the Chancellor’s advertised dullness, he has adopted a strategy of deception which his predecessor would be proud of (and probably authored). It can best be compared to the technique of professional magicians. Before any trick, they perform what is called ‘the pledge’ — whereby the audience is shown something normal: a pack of cards, which someone will inspect to check it’s normal. Of course, it is not. Once a fake backdrop is established, a magic trick is fairly easy to engineer.

The Chancellor devoted much of his Budget to establishing this ‘pledge’. It took the form of a narrative: Britain being caught, through no fault of its own, by the crashing waves of ‘global uncertainty’. According to the Darling ‘pledge’, this global context is — exclusively — to blame for the misery felt by shoppers, motorists and the 45,000 who will have their houses repossessed this year. But luckily, Mr Darling said, years of competent Labour government mean ‘Britain is better-placed then other economies to withstand the slowdown in the global economy’.

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