Brown's last budget
The guiding intelligence behind the measures announced today to start Britain on the road to recovery will be George Osborne.
But responsibility for the pain rests with Gordon Brown.
Nobody likes raising taxes. Nobody likes cutting popular spending programmes. And although the coalition government is committed to making as many of the savings which have to be made in administration and bureaucracy rather than front-line services, only an idiot could imagine that a deficit the size of Britain's could be cut without pain.
But it has to be done, because of the mess Labour left behind. Gordon Brown's legacy is a completely unsustainable fiscal position in which the government was spending four pounds for every three it raised in taxes. In which government debt was heading for £1.2 TRILLION. In which the interest the government was paying on that debt was more than it spends on schools - and was the fastest rising part of government spending.
If this problem is not tackled we are looking at having to have tax rises of £70 billion to pay the INTEREST on the extra debt which Gordon Brown's deficit would cause Britain to borrow.
Even Alistair Darling, one of the few Labour politicians who showed even the least degree of integrity or awareness of fiscal reality during the last election, admitted repeatedly that if Labour had won the election they would have had to make heavy and painful cuts - he specifically admitted that they would have been more severe than those made by Mrs Thatcher - to reduce the deficit.
Of course the chancellor has a tightrope to walk - don't cut enough and he will have to cut even more later, cut too quickly and the risk of a double-dip recession is increased.
But doing nothing is not an option.
If the Chancellor is a popular man this evening he has not been tough enough. But everyone who dislikes one of the measures announced today should remember one important fact.
If the outgoing Labour government had not left the incoming government with a huge and totally unsustainable hole in the budget, today's pain would not have been necessary.
But responsibility for the pain rests with Gordon Brown.
Nobody likes raising taxes. Nobody likes cutting popular spending programmes. And although the coalition government is committed to making as many of the savings which have to be made in administration and bureaucracy rather than front-line services, only an idiot could imagine that a deficit the size of Britain's could be cut without pain.
But it has to be done, because of the mess Labour left behind. Gordon Brown's legacy is a completely unsustainable fiscal position in which the government was spending four pounds for every three it raised in taxes. In which government debt was heading for £1.2 TRILLION. In which the interest the government was paying on that debt was more than it spends on schools - and was the fastest rising part of government spending.
If this problem is not tackled we are looking at having to have tax rises of £70 billion to pay the INTEREST on the extra debt which Gordon Brown's deficit would cause Britain to borrow.
Even Alistair Darling, one of the few Labour politicians who showed even the least degree of integrity or awareness of fiscal reality during the last election, admitted repeatedly that if Labour had won the election they would have had to make heavy and painful cuts - he specifically admitted that they would have been more severe than those made by Mrs Thatcher - to reduce the deficit.
Of course the chancellor has a tightrope to walk - don't cut enough and he will have to cut even more later, cut too quickly and the risk of a double-dip recession is increased.
But doing nothing is not an option.
If the Chancellor is a popular man this evening he has not been tough enough. But everyone who dislikes one of the measures announced today should remember one important fact.
If the outgoing Labour government had not left the incoming government with a huge and totally unsustainable hole in the budget, today's pain would not have been necessary.
Comments
As per post a couple of threads ago, I don't know whether you actually watched the Budget speech but George Osborne specifically said that the recession was started by failures in the banking sector, and he intruduced a new levy on the banks so that the taxpayer can get back some of the money which the sector cost us.