Fleet Street largely unimpressed with PBR

By Alex Smith / @alexsmith1982

The newspapers are largely unimpressed with Alistair Darling’s PBR yesterday.

The Times led with the headline “Reality postponed”, and said:

“As economics this is a miserable choice, and it does not work much better as politics either. Picking off the rich, putting up taxes on business and fudging the budget deficit while trying to make an issue of where the Leader of the Opposition sat his O levels will not prove a winner. Yesterday a government, which once surveyed all before it, decided to give up governing.”

The FT echoed the view that:

“the Budget was based on optimistic medium-term forecasts of higher growth over the next decade”.

The Independent leader says:

“Rarely has a pre-Budget report promised so much and delivered so little. Many were expecting – indeed hoping – for a substantial statement that would set a clear course for Britain’s fiscal future. In the end the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair Darling, delivered a speech shaped more by politics than economics.”

The Guardian leader is somewhat less biting, saying:

“amid awful circumstances, Darling did enough to secure a few not entirely awful headlines. That may be the best Labour could have hoped for.”

Larry Elliot, also in the Guardian writes:

“Most headlines will be about levy on City bonuses but there will be real, permanent pain for those who are lower fown the income scale.”

On the blogs, Left Foot Forward gave the report a 66% approval rating based on its own expectations.

Next Left said the Chancellow’s freezing of the inheritance tax threshold:

“may be the first policy success to arise from Newsnight’s Politics Pen, as Fabian Research Director Tim Horton pitched this proposal to the dragons in the summer.”

Giles Wilkes is glad there’s no Tobin tax, but says even after the PBR we are still effectively where we were before it.

Compass and 38 Degrees both welcomed the Report and are pleased their campaigns for a windfall bonus were met by the Chancellor.

My own immediate view of the good, the bad and the ugly can be found here.