Opinion: I Read the Whole Budget So You Don’t Have To (I Did Not Read the Whole Budget)
Our economics columnist offers his considered analysis of the Chancellor's plans, based on the first page and the pictures.
The budget documents: thick, important, and mostly unread. Photo: The National Archives UK profile, “Cropped Gladstone's Red Box”, via Wikimedia Commons, No restrictions
I have now spent many hours with the Budget documents, by which I mean I put them on the kitchen table and have been eating my dinner beside them.
Here is my analysis. Some things are going up. Some things are not going up yet. Welfare will not be cut before the election, which is a great comfort to anyone who believes elections never happen.
There is a bank, apparently, that doesn’t count as borrowing, which I’ve been trying to open an account with since Wednesday.
There are some charts. One goes up, one goes down, and one goes up and down in a way that I suspect means “we don’t know”.
My conclusion is this: the Budget is a document that tells you what the government thinks will happen, written by people who know it won’t. It is, in other words, exactly like my New Year’s resolutions, and I respect it for that.
The real story: UK politics (BBC News)
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