Hold up! Before you read on, please read this...

This post was published more than 11 years ago

I keep old posts on the site because I often enjoy reading old content on other people's sites. Not everything that is old is bad. It can be interesting to see how views have changed over time: for example, how my strident teenage views have mellowed and matured.

But given the age of this post, please bear in mind:

• My views might very well have changed in the 11 years since I wrote this post. I have written some very silly things over the years, many of which I find pretty embarrassing today.
• This post might use language in ways which I would now consider highly inappropriate or offensive.
• Factual information might be outdated.
• Links might be broken; embedded material might not appear properly.

Okay. Consider yourself duly warned. Read on...

Gordon Brown today announced the detail of his tenth, and final, budget. It has an environmentally green donation to African rainforests, a Labour-red increase in spending on schools and hospitals, a Tory-blue tax cut, and probably something Lib Dem-yellow in there too. Frankly, I got too bored wading through it to notice.

It’s the all-things-to-all-men budget. It sticks up for the little guy by cutting income tax, then screws them over to reward big business by increasing tax rates on small companies while cutting corporation tax. It tries to be green by increasing tax on the biggest gas guzzling cars, but then restricts itself to only the biggest gas guzzling cars. It claims to simplify the tax system by cutting the 10% rate on income tax – but confuses everybody by keeping it for savings income.

Perhaps the main message from the budget comes from all of the ensuing media coverage – nobody quite knows whether they’ll be better off or not, because this Chancellor has created a tax system so complex that it’s impossible for any human to get to grips with the changes right away. Yet he still gets his headline tax cuts, despite the fact that it’s likely many people will be worse off. So everyone loves him while also being screwed over by him.

It’s headline-driven sound-bite government. And they said Gordon Brown was different…