| What
did you think of Gordon Brown’s budget? I think that, like all budgets, it had
some good and not-so-good parts.
The star was the NHS. Rightly
so. The £2 billion next year was identical to
the figure proposed in the Liberal
Democrats’ alternative budget: we were
pleased. The task now will be to make sure the
cash is properly spent – and, for us
locally, that Kingston gets its fair share.
But if the NHS was the
budget’s top attraction, other areas
didn’t fare so well.
The extra money for schools
sounded good, but when you wipe away the press
"spin", education has not done so well.
The Government is set to miss
its target of raising spending on education as a
share of national income this Parliament. It will
spend 3 times as much next year on an income tax
rate cut than this budget gave to schools. The
Prime Minister got quite touchy when I pointed
this out to him at Question Time.
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Perhaps
the biggest budget disappointment was the
pension. With the basic pension set to go up by
just 75p a week this April, I really thought the
Chancellor would step in. But he didn’t.
Yes, he increased the winter fuel allowance
– but pensioners won’t get that till
the winter, and then it’s hardly generous:
for a pensioner couple, it works out at less than
an extra 50p a week each. This Chancellor is forcing too many of
our poorest pensioners to claim income support to
get extra help. When people have paid national
insurance for years and the government’s
national insurance fund has record surpluses, I
believe it’s time for a decent pension rise.
So much for my views, but what
do you think? I will be spending the next few
months analysing the budget’s proposals:
I’ll be cross-examining the Chancellor as a
member of the Treasury Select Committee on Monday
4th April; then I will probably sit on
the Finance Bill Standing Committee from May to
July examining the budget’s tax proposals.
So do let me know what you think. But be warned:
I may end up quoting your views in the House.
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