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Borrowed time

Wednesday, 12th March 2008

The Spectator on Budget 2008

How much better it might have been if Alistair Darling had heeded the advice of the director-general of the CBI, Richard Lambert, and kept his first budget speech to no more than six simple paragraphs. On a day that began with news that central banks around the world had just pumped £100 billion of emergency liquidity into the banking system in order to stave off the untold economic damage that might result from paralysis of the financial system, the British public was looking to the Chancellor for basic competence, frankness and a touch of humility — rather than the boastfulness, deceit and refusal to admit failings that characterised his predecessor’s Budgets. In the absence of a full catalogue of tricksy new taxes and benefits to be announced in the Gordon Brown manner, brevity, matched by firmness of tone, would have been welcome.

But sadly neither was apparent. There was no sting in the tail, no rabbit out of the hat, not a single rhetorical flourish or attempt at a joke. Nor was there any real substance: no beef and certainly no mustard. Instead, the Chancellor took 50 minutes — though it felt much longer — to say very nearly nothing at all, and to say it rather badly. His theme was ‘stability’, a word which he used at least 18 times, coupled with ‘resilience’ in the face of turbulent global economic conditions: yet his unconfident, uncomfortable delivery gave no suggestion that he is capable of being the nation’s bulwark against difficult times ahead. Numerous thorny issues, fleetingly alluded to, were to be referred to committees and consultations, perhaps to be grasped at some unspecified later date. Many previously announced tax changes and policy initiatives were pointlessly reconfirmed. Much time was taken up in repeatedly assailing the Conservative record of a generation ago, as though it were relevant to today’s huge and looming economic threats.

And despite the plainness of Darling’s natural style, there were plenty of nods to the more sophisticated techniques taught him by Mr Gordon Brown. In order to win headlines about fighting child poverty, there was complex tinkering with credits which many of the poorest families may, as so often with Labour’s benefit measures, fail to understand and claim. On the issue of rising prices, of extreme concern to every family faced with startling rises in grocery and fuel bills, he slid past current bad news to offer a bland and unsubstantiated suggestion that the inflation rate will miraculously return to the 2 per cent target sometime next year.

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