As lead balloons go, last week’s Budget went down faster than James Cameron’s submersible in the Mariana Trench. The closer the small-print scrutiny afterwards, the worse it got. The pro-business measures were hardly sufficient to justify the claim that ‘this Budget unashamedly backs business’ — certainly no small businessman I met that evening, when I found myself addressing 300 of them, felt either backed or bucked by it. The ‘granny tax’ caught far more media attention than the claim that ‘24 million people earning less than £100,000 a year will gain’ from the increase in the income tax personal allowance to £9,205.
It was a tinkering and in some areas irritatingly trivial Budget, in which — to revert to my recent theme of the Titanic metaphor — the deckchairs were not only rearranged but left for the elderly to trip over, while extra lifebelts were being handed to the rich. And I have to align myself with the elderly here, since the Institute for Fiscal Studies says that anyone in their late fifties (that’s me) and upwards, and not in the 50 pence income tax bracket now due to be cut to 45 pence, is among the hardest hit.
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