7 NOVEMBER 1998, Page 28

It's a budgette

IN Gordon Brown's long-running series this one was a budgette. The first half was rhetoric with a few figures and forecasts thrown in, like plums into a pudding. The second was an assortment of odds and ends, with a bung to the National Health Service tacked on to keep the troops happy. These autumnal 'green budgets' are one of his innovations, but he does not yet seem to have worked out what to do with them. It is the season for figures and forecasts, and chancellors used to produce them in their autumn statements, but I had hoped that a green budget would be a rehearsal for a Brown budget, with his ideas about taxes set out in good time, so that when they took the stage, all would go smoothly. Plums and bungs are no substitute.