Deeper and down

Waking up to headlines such as 'Cameron sinks to the depths' I confess I wasn't surprised. Somehow the government made a fairly harmless budget seem as if pensioners were to be starved in order to give millionaires that little bit more, and then the chief Tory Party fundraiser, a man who seemed like a second hand car salesman, was filmed by Sunday Times journalists offering quiet dinners with David Cameron en famille in return for £250,000.

The wheels seem to have fallen off the Tory presentational machine.

The budget was timid. Our upper income tax rate of 50% was the highest in Europe and an independent report said it was damaging rather than helping the economy. Osborne should have reduced it to 40%, which is still high. The tax regime, which makes 5% of earners pay 25% of income tax, is still far too progressive. But all sections of society are taxed too much because of Osborne's (and Brown's before him) passion for public spending: Osborne borrowed an extra £140 billion in his first year and will borrow an extra £120bn in his second.

I had no idea that pensioners have a higher tax threshold than ordinary people and it seems sensible to close this gap. Independent reports are that pensioners, on average, will lose a quarter of one percent of their income. This desn't seem much and, as Mr Osborne says, we are all in this together.

These are criticisms the Government should have swept aside, but didn't. Mr. Milliband's suggestion that cabinet ministers would benefit from the budget was contemptible, and someone should have said that.

As to the 'cash for access' stuff, it's useless trying to lobby the Tories because they can't even get their own ideas past the LibDems in the coalition.

Something is badly wrong here with the workings of government and party and Cameron needs to clear it up.

Oh - the headlines were about a film director of the same name going in a submarine.