Not a Budget for guzzlers

I wonder where you were when you heard today’s Budget?
If you were sitting in a pub then I hope you didn’t cry into your beer. With a whacking, above-inflation increase in booze tax on the way it’s far too precious to dilute.
May be you were in a car showroom, waiting to sign up for a new Range Rover. If you were, I wouldn’t be surprised if you bolted for the door faster than Lewis Hamilton.
Mind you, if you are a pensioner then I can well imagine you sitting in your armchair chuckling quietly and cranking the boiler up.
So those are the headlines – punishing increases in the taxes paid on anything alcoholic, a £950 gas guzzler tax, and a feelgood political pay-off line of significant increases in the winter fuel payments made to pensioners.
Some people had expected Chancellor Alistair Darling to paint a grim picture of the world economy that allowed him a rational retreat from some of the grander claims Labour has made about the UK's finances.
No such luck, Mr Cameron. Britain’s better placed than many countries to ride out all the storms, was the Darling line.
I particularly like the way he monotonously wandered past the announcement that, in the space of one year, Government borrowing will go up from an already heady £36 billion to an eye-watering £43bn. He also pulled another sly trick: generously delaying the 2p increase in fuel duty until October...and slipping in an announcement that there'd be another rise in 2010. What a showman!
This all tells you just how bad Government finances are, and effectively admits that even though there is the best part of £2 billion of tax increases by 2010 in the Budget that still won’t be enough to stave off a tax shortfall brought on by economic growth likely to be more than one per cent down on last year’s 3%.
It also explains why the Chancellor stood firm on his decision to slap a £30,000 charge on ‘non-doms’ – rich foreign business people who base themselves here. He also stood by his (admittedly modified) decision to increase Capital Gains Tax, the tax paid on money made when a business is sold.
That’s going to stick in the craw of some business people. When Labour first cut CGT it was sold as a simple way of encouraging people to think they would benefit in the long-term from going into business. What’s changed, other than the Government’s need to rake in more tax?
What else was in the Budget for business? A plan to make new commercial buildings zero carbon by 2020. Otherwise, not much we didn’t already know about.
Darling repeatedly said he was committed to maintaining economic stability, which is probably the single most important thing any Government can do, especially in the current uncertain climate.
I did have a chortle at one thing, though: yet another initiative aimed at cutting red tape. Through an ‘urgent’ review…
This is the Government’s favourite delaying tactic and there were a fair few of those in there, including consultation about encouraging lenders to offer more fixed-term mortgages. Darling won’t report back on that consultation until he delivers his next Pre Budget Report in November.
Why wait that long? The problems in the housing market are ticking away now.