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. Mr Brown’s new forecasts in the Budget confirm that the tax take will continue to rise as a share of national income to a level even greater than previously feared; he only increased the inheritance tax and stamp duty thresholds by trivial amounts, and quietly slipped in a stealth capital gains tax increase, a further raid on financial companies and a range of other tax hikes worth hundreds of millions of pounds a year under the guise of ‘anti-avoidance’.

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This is bound further to depress business investment, already at its lowest level in history; so much for his commitment to competitiveness, the City of London and the high-tech industries he claims to want to encourage. Even more ludicrously, given the desperate shortage of available housing, Mr Brown will proceed with a new planning gains tax on land for development.