The Budget has left behind an overwhelming sense of economic failure and foreboding that the financial crisis, which is still far from over, will create a prolonged and painful legacy of weak public finances. Politically the has been an open goal for the Tories. The Government has done too little, too late, to follow the Liberal Democrat lead on fair taxation and housing the homeless. They look as if they are acting out of electoral desperation, not real political conviction. So the Conservatives have had a wonderful opportunity to gloat.
More mature reflection may suggest to them, and the wider public, that there is little reason to gloat. The failure is much deeper: that of a model of economic growth which originated a quarter of a century ago in Thatcher's resurgent Britain which New Labour meekly adopted. And the more successful the Tories are in transforming this crisis into votes, the greater the likelihood of their inheriting a deep, systemic problem which they helped to create and which their modern PR skills are now hopelessly ill-equipped to solve.
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