Thursday's papers

Keep calm and carry on is the message from the Guardian this morning as the paper reports on yesterday's budget.

Alistair Darling spurned the chance of a pre-election giveaway budget yesterday when he put his personal stamp on a package designed to cement recovery from Britain's deepest postwar recession while placating a jittery City.

It is a different story in the other papers.The Chancellor used Labour’s last Budget before the election to carry out a £19 billion tax raid on the middle classes to help pay Britain’s record debt says the Telegraph.

Whilst the Mail says

His loyal wife Margaret was clearly impressed with Alistair Darling's Budget yesterday.
But she was almost the only one. Experts denounced her husband's picture of the economic future as wildly optimistic and many of his measures as cheap electioneering.

The Times calls it nakedly political

Faced with a record deficit and an election expected in six weeks’ time, the Chancellor delivered a no-frills financial statement that made a virtue of necessity.

Whilst the Sun says that he bottled the Big One in a blunt bid to hold on to Labour voters at the upcoming general election.

The Independent says that Alistair Darling's Budget must be accounted a success.Under the headline,lights camera action it says

His combination of steadiness, caution and championing of the poor left a sound impression and – depending, as always, on the small print – may end up doing Labour's election campaign some good. If, less ambitiously, the over-riding objective was to do no harm to Labour's election chances,

In other political coverage,the Telegraph reports that Geoff Hoon has been asked to stand down from a top international post after he lost the ‘support’ of Gordon Brown following the lobbying scandal.

Meanwhile says the Times,

The Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS) said that two-thirds of its 300,000 members took part in a 24-hour nationwide strike, which followed a two-day walkout on March 8 and 9.