Deceitful Budget

DURING the General campaign, Labour proclaimed that, if they won, they would restore integrity to Westminster, stability to the Treasury and prosperity to the economy.

- Leo McKinstry

But the Chancellor's shabby, deceitful Budget has dramatically exposed the hollowness such boasts.

None of those goals are likely to be achieved by her raft of measures, which will hammer businesses and households, while at the same time increasing Britain's monumental indebtedness.

Before Rachel Reeves stood up yesterday, there was a consensus the Budget would be a defining moment for the Government, setting its course for years to come.

But her statement was too lacking in coherence or vision to fulfil that ambition. Despite the big figures, this will not go down in history as a milestone that pointed our country in a new direction.

On the contrary, behind all her verbiage and attempts at political point-scoring, she had nothing new to offer. Her approach was the same old socialist policy of ever higher spending by an ever larger state underwritten by an ever higher tax burden.

Her Budget was not a blueprint for renewal but rather an exercise in cynical opportunism designed to mislead the public on an epic scale.

She posed as the champion of fiscal rectitude while putting up government expenditure by £70billion a year. She presented herself as the protector of sound money while elevating borrowing by £32billion a year. And she trumpeted her determination to protect incomes while presiding over tax increases worth no less than £40billion a year, the biggest single rise ever in cash terms, beating the £31.4billion total under Denis Healey in 1975 and the £38.5 billion from Norman Lamont's Budget of 1993.