Watching Gordon Brown’s fantasy Budgets often felt like consuming a large dish of soused herrings — sour, vinegary, and more chewy protein than was palatable.

By comparison, George Osborne’s first effort was chocolate cake topped with whipped cream and strawberries. Given the differences between them, you might think it should be the other way around.

No! Osborne satisfied our despairing appetite for realism, honesty and a massive aspiration for a healthy, self-funding economy in the medium term. How we enjoyed every cut-throat word of it.

Despite his detractors in the City and the media, Osborne’s reputation is made. This Budget will be remembered even more than Geoffrey Howe’s pitch perfect 1981 effort — in which he defied 364 top economists to return the country to growth within a year — simply because, in scale and in enterprise, it tops it by a mile.

The structural deficit will be eliminated by 2014, producing a surplus that will begin the long haul of lowering the UK’s massive stock of public debt. Under Osborne’s strict rule, it will top off at 70% of GDP, not the expected 100% from Labour’s deficit halving plans.

This is serious stuff. It will need reductions in departmental spending of up to 25% across the public sector — apart from Health and International Development. The latter, of course, are political choices not economic ones. Any half competent economist can spot the waste littering these inefficient agencies of the State. I am sure they are marked down for major surgery in the Conservatives’ second Parliament — minus the Lib Dems, perhaps.

One thing I enjoy about this hybrid administration is the zeal with which it scraps anything that has Gordon Brown’s stamp on it. Out goes the FSA, the laughable “Golden Rules”, hugely complex benefit mountains, and, as we’ll hear in the autumn spending review, much of Brown’s cretinous agenda for public sector dominance of personal behaviour.

Brown must wonder why he bothered to build such a vast top-down infrastructure of command and control, especially as all that treasure spent didn’t win him his coverted General Election victory. The Tories are clearly intent on total ruthlessness where corrupt Scottish Labour politics are concerned.

The question we have to ask is why our democratic processes didn’t protect the nation against the mafia-like tactics of Gordon Brown, Mandelson and the rest of New Labour’s despicable crew.

Osborne’s Budget gives us hope that we will never see their like again.

Speculation is rife that the social democrat contingent in the Lib Dems, led by Charlie Kennedy, could split away from the Coalition. I don’t see that happening for a year or two, at least until Labour starts getting decent polling results under a new leader. Harriet Harman is planting the seeds of that move furiously. It could happen within this Parliament.

Nick Clegg and the genuine Liberals may even unite with the Tories to form a real Liberal Conservative Party. His loyalty so far suggests that this could be a return to the old Conservative dominance of British politics for decades to come.

John Evans

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So that was the budget that was. It came, it gamely poked its head above the bunker walls, and faded without trace.

A few coins tossed here, a few more recovered from there, it bored us like all unnecessary excercises do. One or two timebombs aimed at the Tories were sprinkled around the grey landscape pictured by a ruling party that has forgotten why it’s in power. It’s all about saving Gordon Brown’s neck.

As David Cameron is discovering, it’s a brass neck and they are the hardest to chop off.

One thing remains though: the phenomenon that is Alistair Darling, despite rumours that Peter Mandelson wrote the script.

As I argued here on September 5th, 2009, the white-haired lawyer from Aberdeen way is the only credible candidate for the post-Brown Labour leadership. The rest, including Mandelson, are fully implicated in the Brown disaster scenario. Their objective for the next five years is to bequeath the nation with the bovine truculence of this empty man.

So what were the highlights of the first Budget in 2010?

A new tax treaty with tiny Belize — somewhere in South/Central America in case you’re wondering — merely to wrong-foot Michael Ashcroft, the Conservative deputy chairman. What statesmanship Labour vomits up.

There were a rash of statistics proving that Britain is heading for what passes for sunlit uplands in Labour’s infantilized vision. Not the least was a prediction of growth next year in the 3.0 – 3.5 percent range that allowed Darling to conjure up a rosier future than the facts warrant.

Old Labour hacks, like Will Hutton, duly popped up saying, “These numbers are manageable” … But only if they are true, old bean.

Moreover, he went on, “Alistair Darling’s budget is the first serious effort to support innovation and investment since the war.” How precisely does this death-bed conversion differ from all the other fantasy policies we’ve been spun in the past? And, since Labour always fails spectacularly on delivery, why should this be any different?

I doubt little of the detail in the document unveiled yesterday will survive after May 7 plus 50 days — the date of the Conservative emergency Budget.

Let us pass by quickly with averted eyes.

John Evans

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In the end it played the fool with us all, and didn’t frighten the horses. That is all that can be said of Alistair Darling’s second and, let us pray, final Budget.

If the horses remain calm, we should not. Yesterday’s exercise was designed to do one thing: to conceal a massive timebomb set to detonate when the Tories have been in power for a year or two.

In a way it was a game two halves. The first was Prime Minister’s Questions in which Gordon Brown asserted again that the ongoing slump is not a conventional one, preceded by inflation, but a much more serious occurrence caused by a catastrophic drop in financial blood pressure.

However, Alistair Darling’s Budget calculations premised a normal recession in which the economy powers back to higher than trend growth within a year or two as companies rebuild their inventories and buy new machine tools. GDP will, the Chancellor asserted, grow by a sprightly 3.5pc in 2011 before gently easing back to trend. Cue gasps and catcalls from many MPs.

Slumps caused by financial collapse always take much longer to throw off, as did the Great Depression of the 1930s. This one will have a similar trajectory.

The faultline demonstrated here is not built on human error, but on Brownian calculation of advantage. Brown should have bitten his tongue at PMQs and the disparity of logic would not have been so glaringly obvious. His vanity got the better of him.

The IMF were quick to rubbish the Budget predictions of growth. Evan Davis on this morning’s Today programme practically accused the Chancellor of using a false growth figure to conceal a massive fiscal tightening from 2011 onwards. By then, the Conservatives will be in power and Labour will be screaming “Tory cuts!” from the Opposition benches.

There’s not much love lost in politics, but some personnel would be jailed for that under less liberal regimes. One incident caught my eye. As Darling read out the numbers for public borrowing for this year and next, £175 billion, and £173bn — the highest in history and more than all years added together since 1694 — Gordon Brown was laughing.

Was it because he had made history at last? Or maybe because he believes he has scuppered the next Conservative period in office, setting depth charges to explode year after year.

Whatever the reason, it revealed Mr Hyde in full swing and convinces many of us that Dr Jekyll was a figment of our imagination.

As if aware of the skullduggery that had just been played out, David Cameron put up a spirited and angry response to the Budget speech. It was the performance of the day and contrasted markedly with Darling’s leaden oratory — if it can be called that.

Many of us waited for the scorn to be poured all over the new 50p tax rate for high-end earners, the very people who create our wealth and divert their surplus funds into investments. It didn’t come.

One can imagine the delight of low-tax regimes (so-called havens) at the lip-smacking prospect of all those City types heading their way after this Budget-for-Bennites.

This was another Brownian trap for the Tories. How he must be chortling with glee, like Billy Bunter on receipt of his long-awaited postal order and the prospect of a big bag of cream buns.

Thankfully, David Cameron and George Osborne live in the real world.

John Evans
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