Brown, green and drab
THE Pink Panther excepted, this Brown and Green Budget was drab. That was a shame, and an opportunity missed. This Chancellor aspires to be a tax reformer, and goodness knows we need one. Personal taxes and allowances and National Insur- ance and the whole £100 billion battery of benefits — all these intertwine with each other, contradict each other and serve to trip each other up, and us too. He knows this. He means to tackle it. We knew that. How is he going to change it? Well, he hopes to tell us later. It seems that he can- not, after all, anticipate his Budget state- ment. The taxes on savings are a jungle in which successive chancellors have fostered new tendrils. I have long believed that the Treasury has a locked filing cabinet, and that a green paper on these taxes is turning yellow inside it. Why not dust it off, pro- duce it for debate and have the bugs shaken out? This, surely, was what Mr Brown meant when the Green Budget swam into his mind. Capital gains tax cries out for reform, but all he would tell us this week is that he would decide what to do in time to do it in his real Budget. He will have been told that if he shows his hand, those fearful tax avoiders will rush in and take advantage. In any terms, revenue included, that would be a small price to pay for a rational system.
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