Giving Disraeli a run for his money

Gordon Brown is under pressure to produce his most memorable budget

The talk in the Treasury a few weeks ago was that Gordon Brown might be aiming for a budget record this year. Although he is within a year of being longer in the job than Nicholas Vansittart almost 200 years ago, that is not the milestone he was said to have in mind.

Treasury insiders said the chancellor might seek to break the record for the length of a budget speech, which would mean coming in at either less than the 45 minutes Disraeli took to whiz through his measures in 1867 or more than the four hours and 45 minutes Gladstone took to chunter through his oration in 1853. Let's hope it's the former.

A lot can happen in the weeks before budget day so it would be unwise to bank on Brown sitting down before 1.15pm on Wednesday. The fact is, though, he needs to go out with a bang. Comfortably his most significant budget was in 2002 when he raised national insurance contributions to pay for extra NHS investment, as that carefully prepared announcement resuscitated the idea of tax and spend and changed the political weather.

Many of Brown's other efforts have merged. We're now familiar with the themes - fiscal prudence, tax incentives to encourage enterprise, efforts to help the working poor, the focus on children - but over time it's become hard to remember the details. Brown is now under pressure to deliver something memorable. Labour is behind in the polls, although the suspicion is that support for David Cameron is more a function of unhappiness with the government than with genuine enthusiasm for what the Conservatives are putting forward (not much, presently). What's more, Tony Blair's long goodbye has made it difficult for Brown to adumbrate what he might do as prime minister for fear that it would be seen as an attempt to shove the PM out of the door.

That, at least, is one way of looking at it. A less charitable explanation is that Brown is failing to convince people that life will be different once he has the keys to No 10 because life will not actually be that different. On all the really contentious issues - Iraq, tuition fees, foundation hospitals, Trident - Blair and Brown have been on the same side.

Brown's people get extremely frustrated by this accusation, claiming - with some justification - that the chancellor is damned for disloyalty if he deviates even minutely from the government line and damned for being Blair-lite if he doesn't. And that's precisely why the budget is a big moment for Brown: it is one of only two days in the political calendar - the pre-budget report being the other - when the chancellor unquestionably runs the show.

The Treasury is responsible for running the economy and looking after the nation's money; it is entirely legitimate for Brown to have his say on a range of issues that cut across every department in Whitehall.

So, how should he play it? Brown's aim is to use the budget and the comprehensive spending review in the summer to make clear what his priorities would be as prime minister. On Wednesday he will announce the "envelope" for public spending - the annual amount by which the cake will grow in the three years starting in the spring of 2008. Details of the departmental allocations will not be unveiled until June or July.

Focus on education

The only exception will be education, which will get a generous deal in what is certain to be a much tougher settlement than spending ministers have grown accustomed to over the past eight years. Brown believes education is the key to the long-term competitiveness of the economy and that after boosting spending on the NHS to levels comparable with the rest of Europe, it is time the government turned its attention to schools, universities and adult education.

A memorable budget, though, requires more than just a couple of spending announcements, however important. It requires a spine to give it structure. Although I should warn at this point that I have not the slightest idea what Brown is going to say, I would expect him to focus on the three Ss - stability, security and sustainability. The fact that leaks of next month's world economic outlook from the IMF say the UK will have the fastest growth rate of any G7 country this year will enable Brown to contrast his stewardship of the economy with the boom-bust years of the Tories. Despite the concern over the US housing market, Brown approaches his last budget with far less concern about both the UK economy and the state of the public finances than he has in recent years. That's all very well, but the chancellor knows that the budget cannot only look to the past, it must deal with the present and look to the future as well.

In the present, he will argue that the country faces some significant security threats both at home and overseas. The government will not take risks in an age of terrorism and will provide all the resources necessary for the security services inside the UK and for the troops fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The future is all about sustainability - both economic and ecological. As such, there will be the focus on long-term skills, the science base and raising spending on schools; coupled with a range of green measures designed both to flesh out the government's commitments on climate change and to steal Cameron's thunder.

The Treasury has been bombarded with suggestions of what it might do - from a £2,000 a year vehicle excise duty on "Chelsea tractors" to a hefty increase in the government's low carbon buildings programme, which provides grants to help people install renewable energy sources in their homes.

Brown will have to be a bit more convincing than he was in the pre-budget report, when the increase in air passenger duty was seen - rightly - as a feeble response to the Stern review. The noises coming out of the Treasury suggest Brown will offer carrots as well as sticks.

Provided Brown resists the temptation to brag about his economic record and leaves out the wodge of minor tax changes that send most of us off to sleep, he should be able to give Disraeli a run for his money. The papers would be full of how a "bright and breezy" Brown oozed confidence as he delivered the quickest budget in history.

Some might argue, of course, that the stability of the economy - built as it is on an Everest of borrowed money - is a mirage, and that the US housing crisis could soon be heading across the Atlantic.

Others might argue that it is a bit rich of the government to say that security is its number one concern when Britain is clearly seeking to fight wars in Iraq and Afghanistan on the cheap.

It might also be argued there is a rather large reality gap - a reality gulf, in fact - when the government preaches sustainable environmental policies while pursuing economic policies that make the problem worse not better, and that the right sort of budget for Britain now would be one that emphasised the need for frugality and thrift.

But for thrift and frugality, Disraeli's not really your man. You need a Gladstone for that.