Big Brother would be proud

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, when the Party said ‘peace’ it meant ‘war’, and when it said ‘freedom’ it meant ‘slavery’. Listening to Gordon Brown’s tenth and possibly last Budget speech on Wednesday afternoon, it seemed at times as if he had mistaken Orwell’s fictional masterpiece for a manual for chancellors of the exchequer in trouble.

Mr Brown’s central theme that he is working night and day to equip Britain to face the challenges of globalisation was a brilliantly executed yet meretricious exercise in Orwellian Newspeak. The truth is that his record on competitiveness has been abysmal, as demonstrated by Britain’s relegation on every respectable economic league table. To pretend in the Budget that ‘Britain is better placed than ever to be the global economy’s success story’ is proof of nothing more than the Chancellor’s capacity for almost boundless chutzpah.

Far from helping businesses and workers adapt to the increasingly competitive global economy, the Chancellor’s addiction to tax and spend has been directly responsible for the death by a thousand cuts of Britain’s once successful liberal economic model.