What the media commentators are saying about the budget

A wide selection of views here


Martin Wolf writing in the FT describes a desperate chancellor flying on a winga nd a prayer

Only Alistair Darling, most emollient of politicians, could manage to make this Budget boring. He is telling his country that its prosperity was as fraudulent as a collateralised debt obligation, that Gordon Brown’s boasts of “no more Tory boom and bust” are a joke, that the forecasts he gave only last November were nonsense, that the public finances are deteriorating at a rate never seen in peacetime and that, to cover these failures, he is indulging in populist attacks on the highly paid. To make this feel boring is an achievement.

Steve Richards in the Independent writes that

The constraints on Darling were almost comically intimidating, an economy facing frightening levels of debt, the markets watching like hawks to judge whether a route towards more balanced budgets was credible, the wider electorate wondering about the impact on their lives, the users of creaking public services fearing that they will creak more in the years to come.

but adds that if the growth are proved wrong

he will have no wriggle room, politically or economically, between now and the election.

Peter Oborne in the Mail describes the budget as a desperate attempt to cling to power.This could have been the moment he writes

that Alistair Darling made his reputation as a bold, visionary statesman with the courage and personal stature to rescue Britain from catastrophe.But no, Alistair Darling ducked the challenge. He ran away from the sound of gunfire. He failed the nation and he failed himself.

Polly Toynbee laments the fact that it ahs taken Labour this long to produce a people's budget

The 1.5% who earn over £100,000 will yet again claim an assault on "middle England". They will protest that productivity, growth, aspiration and the very future of the nation will be imperilled by skimming just a little cream off top earners. They will warn that City talent will now take flight, the golden geese fleeing to Zurich, Monaco or Dubai. At last, so late in the day, Labour has called their bluff: let them go. There is no global shortage of those who ran banks into the ground.

And in the same paper Will Hutton believes that the Chancellor did as well as he could

He must seethe at his inheritance, yet he has not uttered a public word of reproach. Instead he has loyally owned the crisis as his own, and his considered calmness is becoming a considerable economic and political asset. Brown and the Labour party are lucky in this chancellor.