" AN IMAGINATIVE BUDGET "
Sia,—I have so great a respect for your political judgement that I am loth to pit my own against yours in the scales of a just balance. Yet I feel I must venture upon an expression of pained surprise which has left me limp after reading and digesting your eulogy of the Chancellor and his Budget. For, Sir, in my submission there never was a Budget so lavish in the sowing of tares among the wheat or so nakedly and (what is worse!) unashamedly partisan in character. This in itself should occa- sion no surprise, but I did not anticipate orchids for Mr. Dalton from one who is usually aloof from the dated cohorts who surround him. Can it be in dispute that this is a Budget confiscatory in purpose and seeking to make private enterprise pay for its own extinction, accom- panied by Gestapo-like threats of what will happen to it (suggestive of avoidable tortures before unavoidable doom) if it doesn't behave itself, or, 2S another eminent statesman put it, doesn't " play ball "? The transference of Eatanswill to Downing Street is no matter for pride. But for the exertions of private enterprise the Chancellor would have been unable to present a balanced Budget. " Imaginative " is not the most apt of descriptive titles. For it is to our imagination, without a clue, that the Chancellor leaves the problem of how he is going to make us pay for all the extravagant schemes of nationalisation to which we are committed.—
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