Budget Day

I suspect that Tony Blair will want to complete ten years in Number 10, so Brown´s tenth budget may well be his penultimate, not his ultimate as currently suggested. If Blair can hang on and ward off the lame duck tag, he will surely try for summer 07 for his much-expected retirement from Downing Street.

Brown knows more than I do, and his budget seemed like the budget of someone preparing his stall, but not of someone campaigning for the top job. He has time yet to do that. This budget was a bit of shuffling things around and some more money for education.

Firstly, I welcome the increase in education funding as of fundamental importance – the ambition to spend as much per pupil in state schools as in private schools is laudible, but I didn´t see the specifics of exactly how and when this ambition will be achieved – also, spending the same is not the same as getting the same results, school reform is absolutely vital and I think Blair´s package was in a generally positive direction, but had many drawbacks. It is essential to make schools as independent as possible, give teachers the resources, training and assistance to do the job, get parents as involved as possible, and treat each child as an individual and treat their education as a voyage of discovery in unearthing their individual talents and giving them the knowledge and skills to best exploit those natural talents. It is not about barking national curriculum one-size-fits-all syllabuses at a large classes of bored and alienated children. So, a good move, but only a single step in a long, long journey.

Apart from that, I don´t think there was much to get excited about. The environmental packages were good in the sense that they existed at all, but they were woefully inadequate and noteworthy chiefly for their timidity. The car tax thing could have been far more radical, and whilst vague assistance for solar panels sounds good, it is, like education above, a million miles from actually making a worthwhile difference.

Cameron did okay in response, he had some good gags but it was really all just practice for the election, painting Brown as in the past and wedded to old-fashioned tax and spend. Seeing as the Tories are largely matching his tax and spend plans, I don´t see an interesting alternative on offer, so why bother voting for anyone else? As usual, the Lib Dems made the best points but, also as usual, in the worst way. A nervous and bungling Ming Campbell was batted aside, not because Blair thought he was wrong, but because Campbell himself seemed to think he was wrong, so lacklustre is his performance.

So, a steady as she goes budget with a couple of headlines in education and sport (I like the schools olympics idea), a warm up for the real final budget next March – I wonder who´ll be delivering the 2008 budget? Jack Straw? Alistair Darling?

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