Budgets

I don’t know about you but I am always bewildered by budgets. Indeed I wonder why they attract the attention they do. Being self-employed I am never very sure how much money I earn - it rises and falls like the tides - so I can never tell from the tables whether we are better off and if so by how much. In any case it doesn’t seem to matter very much - a couple of hundred pounds over the course of a year is neither here not there these days and with everything from Council Tax to dental charges rising at astronomic speeds I doubt very much whether any of us will benefit in the slightest from Mr Darling’s ministry of the public purse.

So it’s a question of - in the delicate Eton phraseolgy of the late Alan Clark - ‘Heads down, bully and shove.’

Quite what this means I am never quite sure - having not had the benefit of siblings who attended that estimable establishment. I suppose it to mean much the same as Churchill’s dark injunction to ‘Keep Buggering On,’ which I am told that he shortened to avoid giving overt offence to sensitive souls to KBO.

But back to Mr Darling and his somewhat unimaginative budget. What I found sad in my limited perusal of the headlines was the lack of any creative spark, a tiny rabbit pulled out the financial hat, that would liberate some group or other from the grimy clutches of the Revenue and Customs, thus proving to us all how far-sighted and sensible the man was.

After all one would like to think that his name was not entirely a piece of baptismal bluff. Wouldn’t it be nice to imagine that in response to a sagacious piece of generosity, some group of pensioners, or garret-living artists, or carers, or state servants of the more useful sort, would be even now running up grateful headlines that spoke glowingly of ‘The Darling Mr Darling! with a illustration of the man smiling with eyebrows - the like of which we haven’t witnessed since Denis Healey haunted the despatch box - raised elegantly in appreciation?

If Mr Darling has helped some group in this way, then I plead ignorance and laziness in reading the paper. I do find these matters bore me. I am more interested in the amber contents of the tumbler the Chancellor knocks back during the Budget speech than in the content of his proposals as such. Though I suppose that these days the practice of Chancellors ‘refreshing’ themselves during budgets has been discontinued for fear of corrupting the youth. Still 55p on my patent remedy for the common cold is almost enough to make me turn up at the doctor’s surgery out of spite.

Perhaps I get this attitude from my doughty old great aunt whom the Inland Revenue, as it then was, used perennially to try to make complete a tax return. She happened to be very poor and quite without assets and lived in a bed-sit, so quite what the Revenue hope to extract I am not sure. Nevertheless, she objected to their forms. Her habit was to write across them in bold letters ‘I DO NOT PAY INCOME TAX’ and return the form whence it came. Nothing ever seemed to happen - that is until the following year when the procedure was repeated.

But here’s an interesting snippet for the next time the conversation around the dinner table shows a tiresome desire to depart in the direction of money in general and tax in particular. Do you know why the tax year ends on 5 April? Apparently the reason is that rents and taxes always used to be collected on Lady Day - the 25th March - and this, until 1752, was effectively the end of one tax year and the beginning of the next.

In 1752 however, the calendar was changed to bring us in line with the Continental (Gregorian) calendar that had been in use since 1582. Britain, as we know, has a traditional hesitancy in joining European initiatives and with Queen Elizabeth in charge of matters we determined to stick with our old ways. But after 170 years not only were we 11 days adrift from the rest of Europe, but the summer and winter solstices no longer occurred when the calendar decreed.

So after a lot of fuss the calendar was changed. Wednesday 2 September 1752 was followed by Thursday 14 September 1752. The move was not popular of course. The cry of “give us back our 11 days” preceded no end of grumbling.

The Inland Revenue - canny folk that they are - were not so easily to be diddled out of 11 days worth of cash. So, in effect, they refused to countenance the calendar change. The tax year may begin on what we know as 6 April but to the Inland Revenue it is still really 25 March.