The post you are reporting:
Is tomorrow, Wednesday 22nd April.
There was a time when budgets were kept secret and Chancellors were said to 'go into purdah', in other words isolate themselves, for a few weeks beforehand in case they inadvertantly revealed a budget secret. Doing so would be regarded as a resigination or sacking issue.
This all changed in 1997 with Gordon Brown's first budget. Instead the name of the game was to prepare the ground with carefully revealed bits of information before the budget. These details could be a mix of solid facts about what was to come and carefully prepared mis-information. News management and ensuring the right spin was placed on announcements became much more important the the secrecy of old. Brown usually kept back one surprise for the speech, always something he wanted highlighted in the media, of course.
This year is no different with a mass of careful leaks. Some information, no doubt, being designed to mislead with other details more accurate testing the reaction. This, as always, has been accompanied with much speculation. Darling will also certainly be holding back one surprise though as his predesessor did.
There is no doubt that this will be a hard budget and Darling will be forced to reveal some terrifying borrowing figures. Tax rises and/or budget cuts are also likely, indeed cuts in public spending are unavoidable in the near future whatever Darling announces.
One thing I have learned over the years with NuLab budgets is that what is in the speech tells only a fraction of the story. It is the details of the speech that will feature on tv in the instant reaction and will get the main newspaper headlines the day after.
The speech is designed for that purpose of spin and presentation. This year though even the speech cannot avoid all the bad news. But even so the budget book, containing the detail that was left out of the speech, is what is really important. That tends not to get the spotlight shone on it so much, except in the weightier Sunday papers and, perhaps, the FT.
Within 24 hours of the budget I will receive over a dozen budget commentaries from insurance companies, investment companies, financial analysts and specialist financial publications. These take their information from the budget book and tend to be particularly useful as many of these focus on the real impact on people's lives. This is simply because they are designed for those like me who will be advising people of all ages, whether wealthy or not, on the impact of all this on their finances.
I will provide my initial reaction to what Darling says on this thread, but will then come back a day or so later on with a more thoughtful and detailed commentary on the impact of the measures. This will be after I have absorbed the meaning of it all and that information left out of the speech. I will try to keep the politics to my initial reaction only!!!!