March 13, 2008 | posted by Michael Baxter in UK economy |

Aside from burying his head in the sand, and doing his best to cure all insomniacs of their unfortunate affliction, the chancellor did make a few announcements yesterday of some vague interest.

Actually, if you work in the pub industry, there was a lot more than vague interest. Pubs are suffering at the moment, thanks to the smoking ban – now they are set to suffer some more.   Beer is going up 4p a pint, wine 14p a bottle, and spirits by 55p a bottle.

There’s an argument to be made for saying these were good tax rises – as they are a step in the direction of fighting binge drinking. This may or may not be a valid argument, but there is no doubt, the pubs and clubs industry is set to be even worse off thanks to this budget.

A tax on plastic bags is also arguably a good move – and let’s face it, if you are worried about the cost of plastic bags, all you need to do is hang on to them for longer.    But at the same time, this tax is hardly earth shattering – the fact that it made the headlines just showed how inconsequential this budget was.

The chancellor said he was postponing the 2p rise in fuel duty to October – well, with oil so high in price he had little choice.

From 2010, new cars that are low-polluting will  require zero car tax in year one, while high polluting cars will require £950.    As Harold Macmillan once said, the devil is in the detail, and sure enough, if you drill down you see some apparent anomalies. One press report pointed out that owners of some Bentleys will pay less car tax than owners of  some family saloons.  But that is missing the point, the chancellor wanted to tax pollution, so we pay the true cost of our motoring, he was not trying to tax high living.

He also announced measures to reduce child poverty – that is very laudable – but the money involved is actually quite modest.

One of the more interesting ideas was for £12.5m going into a venture capital fund for investing into women-owned businesses.

The money is tiny but at least it’s an interesting idea.

But surely the real story of this budget is in what it didn’t do? See story above.