The "nothing" Budget
Article Date: Apr 24 2009One line in Alistair Darling’s Budget speech really summed the whole thing up for me.
‘We could have decided to do nothing. But we chose to act.’
Now I know expectations of government are pretty low, but for the Chancellor to ask for applause simply for taking some action verges on the ridiculous.
The statement underlines another inescapable fact. What the government has done is not nothing, but it’s a lot closer to nothing than the situation seems to justify.
There are good things about the Budget: the money for innovative technologies and the support for green industries, for instance. But for the vast majority of companies struggling to make ends meet, what has been done will indeed feel like nothing.
There is nothing to help with the problem of late payment which is squeezing so many businesses, nothing to mitigate the planned rise in national insurance contributions which will discourage companies from expanding, and nothing to help get corporate lending flowing again.
Sad to say, it’s a Budget lacking both in ambition and imagination. Even what it has done to stimulate the cleantech sector may be too little, too late: far from ‘setting the lead’, as Darling claimed, the UK recently fell to 15th place globally in terms of renewable energy investment, behind much poorer countries such as Romania and the Dominican Republic.
And then there’s the other pressing problem of the ballooning national debt, which Darling estimates will amount to £175 billion this year. In this context, the extra £6 billion he hopes to raise by increasing taxes on high earners and bumping up alcohol, tobacco and fuel duties seems like small change.
If there was ever a time for strong leadership and bold action, this is it. Instead, we have a Chancellor who scarcely seems to believe his own words any more – no surprise, perhaps, when no-one else does – and a Budget whose scope is limited not just by the grim economic situation but by political expediency. The Conservatives had a point when they described the current administration as the government of the living dead: unfortunately, they have been quicker to hurl abuse at an easy target than to share their own inspirations about how we can crawl out of this hole.
