‘I never could make out what those damned dots [decimal points] meant.’
Randolph Churchill, Chancellor of the Exchequer 1886

The other morning I was idly trying to identify any Budgets passed during my working lifetime that actually mattered, that made a real difference.

Sir Geoffrey Howe’s first Budget, in 1979, doesn’t count as I was still technically in full-time schooling. His third, in March 1981, very definitely does. I was on a course in Newcastle at the time. ‘Howe it hurts’, reported the Daily Mirror.

By cutting spending and putting up taxes at the bottom of a recession the Budget flew in the face of orthodoxy and triggered an open letter from distinguished economists saying the Chancellor was wrong.

It has since become fashionable to deride these learned types on the ground that March 1981 in hindsight can be seen as the moment Britain’s recovery began. Tax rises made room for interest-rate cuts. Eventually, the good times would roll again.

This rather overlooks the fact that rates were rising again by the end of the year, but that said, this was definitely a Budget that mattered and which changed the terms of debate.

On to 1984, and Nigel Lawson’s first outing. This is the technical Budget, the one savoured by fiscal anoraks as if a fine wine. Life assurance premium tax relief was abolished, which pretty much kiboshed the reasoning behind endowment mortgages, but with maybe 100,000 people involved in selling them they lasted for a good decade afterwards.

Business was initially delighted by cuts to corporation tax, but then, as Christopher Fildes noted in The Spectator, Lawson had also abolished many allowances, so the new corporation tax, unlike the old, was compulsory.

I’d say 1984 qualifies as significant, as did Lawson’s 1988 Budget, although perhaps not in the way its author intended. By abolishing double mortgage tax relief but with a time delay, it stoked an unsustainable house-price boom, fuelled in part by cash released by the 4p off income tax in total in the Budgets of 1987 and 1988.

That’s it for some time for Budgets of significance. John Major, Norman Lamont and Kenneth Clarke all, to varying degrees, produced workmanlike fiscal statements, but it was not until Gordon Brown entered the Treasury that life became interesting again.

His first, 1997, Budget abolished corporation tax credits, allegedly destroying Britian’s pension sector, and stepped up spending on hospitals and schools. It also staked out two priorities that have been followed more or less slavishly by Chancellors ever since: money for childcare (other people’s babysitters, as P. J. O’Rourke put it) and assistance for the British film industry.

The former led directly to the ludicrous spectacle of Jeremy Hunt enthusing about ‘breakfast clubs’, while the latter has provided endless amusement as a more generous scheme is rolled out, then ‘abused’ by wealthy footballers and the like, then withdrawn and replaced. In the process, British studios have produced a ton of what Jacques Peretti, writing in the Guardian more than twenty years ago, called shit flicks.

George Osborne’s 2010 Budget, his first, is the last to date of any significance, heralding the ‘austerity’ years and confirming that the party of the 1990s and 2000s was well and truly over. Since then, an interchangeable crew of Chancellors – Philip Hammond, Rishi Sunak and the rest – have presided over a drifting economy and a series of Budgets as unmemorable as their authors.

So on to Rachel Reeves. Will this statement be a big deal? Well, to end with misquoting another Tory statesman from yesteryear, Arthur Balfour: ‘Nothing matters very much and few Budgets matter at all.’

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