Osborne needs to speed up

Will the Budget make a difference? Nowadays, we have a quick and easy guide: Box 3.1 from the Office for Budget Responsibility — otherwise known as the ‘blind bit of difference’ test. Sure, Budgets can make your hot takeaway lunch 20 per cent more expensive and your cigarettes cost £7.50 a packet, but the question, in a recession, is whether any stardust can be found between its pages. Whether it will be do anything for jobs, the deficit or economic growth. The Budget nowadays is handed to the OBR in advance of publication and assessed for its impact on the economy. The verdict: speeding up the corporation tax cut (another welcome move, and brave of Osbrone to do it during a deficit period) may add 0.1 percentage points on economic growth in four years’ time. Other than that, the grim outlook hasn’t
changed.

In my Telegraph column today I say that Osborne is slowly breaking free of the traps set for him by Gordon Brown, but doing it too slowly.