Gordon Announces Number 10 Budget, or Budget Number 10

Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon “Patience” Brown presented his tenth, and possibly last, Budget to the House of Commons earlier this week. The deal he made with Tony Blair ages ago is due to force Mr. Blair into retirement (and not before time) while Mr. Brown becomes PM. The budget looks heavy on politics and light on economics, suggesting that Mr. Brown is more worried about the Tories new leader than the economy.

If one takes the budget as a foreshadowing of future Prime Minister Brown’s priorities, his version of the Labour Party will spend, in definite and deliberate contrast to David Cameron’s “Tax Cuts R Us” Conservatives. Good Ol’ Gordo will raise the amount spent on pupils in the state schools from £5,000 a head to £8,000 each, which is what is spent on private school pupils, which could take 15 years to achieve. He said it was “a Budget for Britain's future to secure fairness for each child by investing in every child.” Somewhere in there, he also decided to tax gas guzzling cars (“Chelsea Tractors,” as SUVs are known), drop an energy assistance payment to pensioners, and add a £970 million plan to help first-time home buyers (Labour subsidizing house purchasers? The sound one hears is Nye Bevin rolling over in his grave).

Douglas McWilliams, chief executive of the City analysts CEBR, asked in the Guardian, “Who needs a cabinet, when you’ve got Gordon Brown? At times, the speech covered policies one might expect to be announced by the Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, or another of his ministerial colleagues. But what was lacking from today's performance was much economics.”

The conservative and Conservative press attacked Mr. Brown for bribing people with their own taxes, and that is what he did. Still, cutting taxes for the sake of cutting taxes is to commit the great Thatcherite sin of knowing what something costs but not knowing what it is worth. Mr. Cameron, nonetheless, did respond rather effectively, “What we’ve got is a chancellor who has taxed too much, borrowed too much and is the roadblock to reform. He is a politician completely stuck in the past.” In other words, “Gordon’s turn was last election. The next one’s mine.”

Sir Menzies Campbell, the new and mature leader of the Liberal Democrats, said “This Budget was an opportunity. In a period of relative stability, with low inflation and stable employment, the Chancellor had an opportunity to show his worth. He could have tackled the unfair tax system. He could have made the environment a priority. He could have faced up to the pensions crisis. He could have addressed the problem of personal debt. He has declined to do any of these. This is a legacy from which it will be difficult for him to escape.”

Before he can escape from any legacy, he needs to move from Number 11 to Number 10 Downing Street, and he can’t do that until the Blairs move out. Until that happens, he won’t be rocking the economic boat because his chances of a successful premiership hinge on it.

© Copyright 2006 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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