Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Cameron lays into the Government of the Living Dead

The highlight of the Budget began the moment Alistair Darling sat down. David Cameron’s brief, savage and brilliantly detailed attack on Labour’s ‘decade of debt’ must rate as his best ever parliamentary performance. At 12:30 the Chancellor stood up and delivered his budget in the studious, methodical manner of a vicar running through the accounts of a village fete.

He began with a Noddy-in-Toytown history of the recession, reminding us that it all began back in 2007 when those naughty Americans started making lots and lots of silly loans. Then he said that the recession brought unexpected blessings. Families with tracker-mortgages were saving £230 a month. ‘Inflation has come down’, he said, ‘so people’s incomes will go further.’ Yes, and it’s a great time to be a bailiff, a scrap-metal dealer and a pusher of anti-depressants. And if you want to get on the housing ladder you’re laughing. Hey, if recession is this good let’s enshrine it as the first goal of fiscal policy.

In his unassuming way Darling admitted that the economy would shrink this year by 3.5 percent but pointed out that the figure was ‘in line with other countries.’ He talked reassuringly about the ‘sustainable path’ and ‘a confident and successful Britain’. The ‘underlying strength’ of the economy would bring a return to growth ‘by the end of the year’. The RPI would fall to minus 3 percent in September before returning to zero in 2010. It all sounded perfectly reasonable. There might be a lot of debt but Darling knew how to bring it down. He even suggested he could reduce it faster than planned but was anxious not to ‘choke off the recovery.’

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