A Budget for Brown

‘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.