There are, lest you need reminding, two levels of deception on Budget Day. First, there’s the Chancellor’s Budget statement, which is pretty obviously spun to put the best light on things. I refer you to when Brown triumphantly announced a 2p cut in the basic rate of income tax in his final Budget statement, while somehow forgetting to mention that the 10p rate has been abolished. And then there’s a Budget document itself, in which much of the most revealing content is tucked away in appendices and footnotes. Even straightforward spending figures are hard to come by in the Red Book.
In which case, we’ll be doing our best to catch out Darling in our live-blog of his statement from 1230. And we’ll be blogging about the contents of the Budget document as soon as we get our hands on it. But we’d certainly appreciate any insights that CoffeeHousers can offer in the comments sections – you can download the document from here once Darling finishes his statement. Or, if you feel like it, you can join in the Tories’ crowdsourcing response here. It is, after all, the way of the future.
P.S. I mentioned the Tories’ crowdsourcing idea for the Budget response yesterday – but I didn’t credit Dizzy for coming up with it in a blog-post a couple of weeks ago. Yet another striking example of a blogger influencing politics.
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