Any other business | 26 March 2011

Next, Osborne should tackle the plague of charity shops depressing our high streets

The dramatic form of the modern, Brownian Budget speech requires a headline-grabber at the end to deflect commentators from analysis of the statistical soup and re-announced tax-tinkering that went before. But the politics of being ‘all in it together’ means that the rabbit in George Osborne’s hat was never going to be abolition of the 50 per cent top rate of income tax — and he made that pretty clear long before he got up to speak. So if you were planning to spend this weekend restocking your cellar with first-growth clarets (following Christopher Silvester’s excellent advice last week) on the strength of a sudden shrinking of your tax bill, you were misguided. It was, nevertheless, one of the most sensible things Osborne could have done. Alistair Darling’s poison-arrow parting shot is reckoned by the Adam Smith Institute and others to be costing the Treasury billions per year in revenues from those who have chosen to move abroad rather than pay it.