Hunt's Budget is doomed

Anyone expecting Jeremy Hunt to unleash the animal spirits of wealth creators in his Budget today cannot have been paying much attention to the Treasury’s pre-briefing. Two per cent off National Insurance is likely to be as good as it gets, we are told. Perhaps a white rabbit will be pulled from a hat during the speech itself but more likely the animal in question will be a sloth.

Such a creature – steady and dependable but resolutely undynamic – would be emblematic of the condition of what pundits used to term ‘UK plc’. For Britain under Hunt does not have an economy so much as a ‘meh-conomy’. While talk of a serious recession is overblown, major GDP growth is not a prospect and GDP per capita continues to decline.

We cannot go on like this for much longer without sliding into an outright social and economic crisis

Meanwhile, George Osborne’s creation of the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) threatens to do to fiscal policy what Gordon Brown’s independence for the Bank of England did to monetary policy: transfer control to unelected bureaucrats immune from the pressures of electoral politics.