The empty Budget

Dangerous, unfair, verging on kleptomania: the bailout deal proposed by the EU at the weekend and rejected by Cyprus MPs on Tuesday is everything it has been described as over the past few days, and worse. Now it has been established that the EU views bank depositors as a potential piggy bank to be raided at whim, it is hard to see why anyone would keep significant quantities of cash on deposit in European banks. We are back where we started in 2007, with the threat of Northern Rock-style bank runs across the Continent.

Yet the proposed raid in Cyprus is really only different in perception from what is being imposed by stealth on British savers. In his Budget, George Osborne admitted how badly his plans are going: he’s spending far more than he intended and receiving far less. The national debt has risen by a full 38 per cent since the election and will have risen by £10,000 in the time it takes you to read this sentence.