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A Confident Budget Prediction - It Will Be Boring!

18th Mar 2014
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Without wishing to give undue offence to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Budgets have become increasingly dull in recent years.

While innumerable pundits, including your correspondent, will be doing their best to create exciting stories out of George Osborne's hour or so of shared wisdom, in reality all of us know that there is unlikely to be anything very interesting on display.

The catch phrase that is now used to express this opinion released a modicum of subtlety is "the devil is in the detail". Deconstructing the phrase, it means that Mr O has expressed nothing worth commenting on while standing at the dispatch box but there has to be a possibility that amongst the hundreds of pages of supporting documentation something worth talking about will be slyly hidden away. Even that is a long shot though.

In the past, there was genuine anticipation when the likes of Lord Lawson of Blaby, now almost exclusively famous as Nigella Lawson's father rather than a former politician, made his annual financial pronouncements.

Partly, that was because in his day, Chancellors did seem to introduce more drastic measures than we usually see in our own much more civilised times.

It may also have helped Dennis Healey, Nigel Lawson and all those other adverts for oversized eyebrows that the Inland Revenue, as it then was, had real teeth and a full set of staff to implement new legislation and put some fear into the hearts of those that did not pay their taxes.

Perhaps more specifically, those in charge of the country's piggy bank did not announce every change ahead of the Budget, the year before or in a half yearly interim event. Neither did they leak every fresh change to the Sunday Times a few days before their hour in the Parliamentary limelight.

So what could dear Mr Osborne do to spice up our lives every spring? If we ignore eminently sensible suggestions such as abolishing income tax/National Insurance Contributions/capital gains tax/VAT or even reducing headline rates, there are still other steps available.

First, he could introduce legislation that does not take between 12 months and five years to hit the statute books. Gone are the days when people sank 15 pints on budget night in the sure knowledge that their only be able to afford 13 the day after.

Secondly, he could mend his leaky ship so that even Rupert Murdoch's finest were not aware of measures before George's friends in the Cabinet, let alone the loyal opposition or loyal voters.

Finally, some exciting new measures that will actually have a serious impact on the pounds in our pockets, perhaps redistributing wealth from people that we don't like to us, would be by far the most welcome new introduction and might even lead to another five years in Parliament for the LibCon Alliance.

However, whether Mr Cameron and his cronies would really welcome a longer spell of coalition with so many common people, none of whom have even visited Eton let alone been educated properly, might be a moot point.

In any event, if there is anything exciting to say on Wednesday lunchtime, you should be in no doubt that AccountingWEB will be ahead of the crowd and there might even be something in this column to celebrate such an unexpected but welcome event.

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