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Unflashy Alistair Darling is a hard man to hit






Oh, did I remember to say that, if I heard Darling right, long-term government borrowing will peak at 57% of GDP in 2013-14? When chancellor Brown followed Ken Clarke in paying debt off in the late 90s he got it down to 36% - low by international standards, as he never forgets to tell us - and is now 37% on Brown's quoted figures, but around 43% on everyone else's.

So we have short-term cuts to stimulate the economy in the coming hard year, well enough framed, it seemed as we listened, followed by sharp tax increases, notably that 45% hit for those earning above £150,000, a tweak that takes money from the £100,000 class and a 0.5% increase in NICs for all but the lower paid, an option I floated earlier today as a mere hunch.

Darling rattled through the detail, but there seemed to be quite a lot of fairness spread throughout it, help for families and the elderly, help for small business and the green agenda. There are usually dangerous details buried in budgets - that Brown 10p tax change for instance - though Treasury officials have been stressing that Darling was determined to be transparent this time. Did I hear him also ease off on the motoring lobby too?

Tory MPs jeered repeatedly whenever the chancellor suggested that Britain was not worst placed to face the recession or that the crisis started in the US - as distinct from being home-grown. The joke wore thin. Labour MPs were generally subdued, as well they might be. Darling is persistently unflashy and when he says "we must all share fairly in the burdens of the future" or that bank customers "must be treated fairly and decently" the jeers stop; Mr Calm's temperament makes him a harder man to hit.

It makes a listener long for an outburst and when Darling expressed mild dissatisfaction with the failure of the utility companies to pass on more of the falling commodity prices we hoped he might add "every 10th utility chairman will, as a result, be taken out and shot on Horse Guards Parade tomorrow at 9am." But he didn't. He's just keeping an eye on them.

George Osborne, struggling to recover from a wobbly patch, did well enough from the sound of it. It's always a hard speech to make. But Darling punctured his dinghy when he said that the Tory policy - not his - would repeat the errors made by Japan in the 90s. He knew because the Japanese finance minister had told him.

Vince Cable, so much older and more experienced, sounded much more grown up and was quick to identify the optimism in Treasury calculations.

A hard road lies ahead for both sides - and most of us.

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Nov 2008