By Mike Haynes

Professor at the University of Wolverhampton Business School in Telford

So is it a good budget? In economics the answer depends on who is looking – what is good for the goose is rarely good for the gander.

With the election only a few weeks away Alastair Darling’s last budget of this Parliament – and possibly his career – tries to be all things to all people but it doesn’t really succeed.

It helps to remember where we came in. The economy may be recovering but this is the worst economic crisis for 80 years.

Unemployment has not risen as much as was feared but output still dropped by six per cent.

The crisis is so serious because the bankers and financiers acted as if they were in a casino. They bet huge amounts and eventually lost. They have been bailed out but many of their toxic debts remain hidden. Now they demand spending cuts for others to help pay for their own irresponsibility.

Alastair Darling’s budget makes only gestures to bring them to heel so that the City financier with a second home in the south Shropshire hills will not be losing much sleep tonight.

Small business people in Shropshire, on the other hand, may have a less restless night if the Chancellor’s measures ease credit.

But one of the problems that no one wants to talk about in Britain is how taxes are raised. “Taxes,” the US Internal Revenue service famously proclaims, “are the price we pay for a civilised society.” But in the last decades top earners and big companies in the UK have paid less of them.

For all the fuss, for the rich, Britain is still a comparatively low tax country. This is not so for the rest of us. The total taxes we pay on incomes and spending, on council tax and business rates, have had to be increased to cover the gap. The Chancellor has done little to address the big imbalances here, depsite the gesture on stamp duty to make life a little less hard for first time buyers.

The arguments that the Chancellor should use the budget for a radical change have not been heeded. Money could have been invested in projects that would have an immediate pay-off. That doesn’t mean airy-fairy schemes or giant projects for new rail systems. It means encouraging smaller scale projects that can improve the community and leave a real legacy. Maintaining the road network by small improvements and filling in potholes is a good idea, but where are the others?

But once again New Labour has made the decision not to rock the boat. If it has resisted calls for big cuts, it is has done little creative to deal with the legacy of the crisis. Whether it will help them turn around more in the opinion polls is hard to see. Certainly it is unlikely to inspire people. But for all the huffing and puffing, what the Tories offer doesn’t seem much different and that’s the problem for people who want a real choice in Shropshire.

This leaves an opportunity for Shropshire’s Liberal Democrats, but whether they too can use criticism of the budget to help overcome the deep suspicion of politics at the moment remains to be seen.