‘A Budget for business’ was how — as usual — it was spun beforehand. ‘A Budget to expand prosperity and fairness for Britain’s families’ was how the speech actually began. But this week’s 11th and final performance from Labour’s longest-serving Chancellor was in reality neither of these things: it was a Budget for Brown.
The price Gordon Brown has paid for the exceptional length of his Treasury tenure and the exceptional strength of his grip on every other part of domestic government is that on Wednesday he was left with very little to say about policy and economic performance that he had not already said many times before. He did only one thing that no one was expecting — cutting basic-rate income tax by two pence — but he instantly took the benefit away again by abolishing the 10p tax band and other changes: in its totality, this was actually a tax-raising budget. And there was nothing he could do to alter the national perception of himself as a curmudgeonly control freak whose personality will not allow him to listen to criticism or acknowledge mistakes or change his course to fit changes of economic circumstance — a perception reinforced with such surgical impact by the former civil servant Lord Turnbull in his observation to the Financial Times, whether intended for quotation or not, about ‘the Stalinist ruthlessness of it all’.
Turnbull’s metaphor was by no means as grotesque as Brown’s Westminster defenders — blatantly jockeying for favour in his coming administration — queued up to suggest. As with the late Russian dictator, the Chancellor’s regime has been characterised by its reliance on central planning, social engineering, suppression of debate and the annual showpiece parade — of welfare policy gimmicks rather than ballistic missiles.
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