The trouble with chancellors of the exchequer is that they tend to take Budgets too seriously. I have always been in favour of chancellors having a small glass of strong spirit to hand during their Budget speech. It is a tradition that has sadly fallen out of fashion.
The last time was back in the 1970s when the rumbustious Denis Healey used to tip back a glass of brandy at strategic moments. It always seemed to me that such a tonic should be obligatory, even if it is just to raise the chancellor’s spirits as they churn through the comparative figures relating to some aspect of trade growth.
Budgets have lost their status as pivotal economic landmarks
You would like to think that you are providing great thoughts. There is the pressure of history and Budgets down the years upon you. Yet what is eating away in your mind is the idea that within two days, if not sooner, the opposition and the press will have grabbed a piece of fraying detail deep within the announced policies, tugged at it, and the debate will be transformed in the public’s mind into ‘a pasty tax’.
A triviality takes root in the collective imagination. Grand strategies for income growth will be forgotten. At root, Budgets have lost their status as pivotal economic landmarks. The problem is that the Budget has been reduced to a shifting around of electoral slogans rather than a genuine effort to make a real and lasting mark on the tax and revenue gathering that it is supposed to be about – something that will really change the landscape and make the tax system fairer and more effective.
A good reforming chancellor should grab the clunking agglomeration of trivial measures accumulated over the recent past. They should be chucked in the bin and replaced with simpler measures free of the ephemeral stuff created pretty much on a whim over past years.
Budgets have become reactive. They ought to be about setting up stuff that works. Arguments in recent years have tended to be about issues that were seen as harmful to a government’s electability. Politics rather than economics.
Forward thinking
Instead, chancellors should take a long view. Sure, they can lob a few short-term measures about – traditionally a change to the price of a pint of beer – but the real point is to make a chancellor’s life easier across the year to come. Their goal should be to increase revenue gradually without triggering too much public protest. The strategy of Budgets is only problematic if you are juggling a mass of minor and, inevitably, competing issues.
And chancellors should get the Budget back to the right time of the year. There was a time when the only question around its timing was which week in March the Cheltenham Festival fell. No chancellor wanted their big moment drowned out by the thunder of hooves or the national distraction of a racecourse in Gloucestershire stealing attention from the economy, the tax details and their own importance.
Budgets are only problematic if you are juggling a mass of minor and, inevitably, competing issues
And spring is the time when people themselves start to think afresh. It is much easier to portray yourself as someone who is opening up new possibilities at that point of the year. November is a time when everyone is hunkering down in autumnal gloom with an eye on the steamroller of Christmas plans remorselessly approaching. Psychologically it is the worst time of the year to be gingering up people’s thoughts on tax and on their own personal finances.
So chancellors are in the wrong place before they start. No wonder they need a strong drink.
