But will it?

Put fuel into the tank of the British economy, that is.

That was the chancellor's claim at the end of his Budget speech. Backed by his surprise tax raid on the oil companies and promise to hold fuel duty down George Osborne will, no doubt, have succeeded in writing his own Budget headlines.

The test of today's announcements, however, will not be that or, even, the extent to which his giveaways really do ease the squeeze on incomes given the rise in VAT, cuts to tax credits and rising inflation.

The Budget will, instead, be judged by whether the chancellor's plan to cut business taxes and to lower the hurdles enterprises face in the form of planning laws, tax rules and government regulations will, in reality, help speed the economic recovery.

Today's new independent forecast showed that the economy is not growing as fast as had been hoped and that the recovery would be slower than after the recessions of the 1980s and 1990s.

So, even after the sort of Budget surprise which Gordon Brown would have been proud of, the key debate remains the same. Will today's measures put fuel into the tank, as ministers claim, or is the only way to do that, as Labour insists, to slow down the pace and lessen the depth of public spending cuts.

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/nickrobinson/2011/03/but_will_it.html

political ads office politics political cartoons 2009 love processor politic politic crack processor