Lord Lawson has given George Osborne’s Budget an A-minus. Writing in today’s Times (£), the former chancellor said that his successor ‘got the big questions right’ by sticking to deficit reduction and assisting hard-pressed taxpayers where he could. The only blemish was the carbon price floor for the energy sector, which Lawson describes as ‘nothing less than an anti-growth strategy’.
Also, Lawson warns Osborne against uniting income tax and national insurance. Unsurprisingly, Mrs Thatcher’s great reforming chancellor looked into this measure and is convinced that it is a non-starter.
‘This superficially attractive reform, which is by no means a new idea, was known in the Treasury in my time as NICIT. I had, indeed, planned a major move towards NICIT in my 1988 Budget, and instituted in 1987 the most thorough study by Treasury and Inland Revenue officials there had been (it had been looked at, less thoroughly, in 1982).
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