The top ten Brownies of Budget 2009

This was a Budget of tricks, of bogus assumptions and of huge traps for the Conservatives. As Lord Lamont says, it was historic in its admission of failure. I do tire of the Treasury’s approach: every Budget we get pie-in-the-sky forecasts, which are torn up later. But the effect of these fake forecasts is to advance (or, in this case, protect) state spending. For all the mentions of 2014/15 this is a Budget designed to last no more than a year.  Here are my top ten Brownies.

1. The “trampoline recovery” theory is a fiction.  To reassure the debt markets (on whom the UK government is now utterly dependent) HMT has concocted the theory of what Cameron brilliantly and instantly called the “trampoline” recovery. Darling says 3.5% growth in 2011, and in 2012 and in 2013. There is not a shred of independent corroboration for this. The independent forecasts, compiled by the Treasury itself (released two months ago) show 2.2%