The more it dazzles on the day, the more worrisome it looks a week later. Somewhere between the 10p tax band and the pasty tax, this became the sage budget-watcher’s maxim. Attention always turns from the crowd-pleasers to the hidden nasties.
George Osborne’s autumn statement may be starting to look like another instance of the same syndrome. It isn’t quite. For one thing, it wasn’t strictly a budget. For another, it is not fair to accuse him of burying the grisliest news. Yes, there was the eye-catching distraction of a small stamp duty giveaway, which threw the suggestible media off the scent for a few hours, but the real story was hardly concealed. The Office for Budget Responsibility talked about rolling the state back to the 1930s that same afternoon, and indeed, in his tax-cutting conference speech two months before, David Cameron had prefigured the OBR numbers, by insisting that all further belt-tightening would come through expenditure cuts. Two sons of Thatcher, the PM and the chancellor may have reflected on the lessons of their youth and concluded that reducing taxes and public spending in parallel could deliver for them, just as it did for the Iron Lady.
Continue reading...