Professional Adviser

Gosling's Grouse: Has the Chancellor come of age?

In a speech two minutes short of an hour, George Osborne at times sounded like a headmaster sending a young pupil out into the big wide world of work.

George Osborne and the Budget
Lawrence Gosling
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In a speech two minutes short of an hour, George Osborne at times sounded like a headmaster sending a young pupil out into the big wide world of work.

Was he remembering his own final days at school when he was told about ‘earning his way in the world'?

We may never know, but certainly for his third budget Osborne repeated on a number of occasions his desire for Britain to pay its way and tried to compare the country's economy with those of China, Brazil and India.

And indeed he revealed that last year the UK exported more to Ireland than it did to the four BRIC nations combined and he committed to improving exports. But where are those exports going to come from?

Has the Chancellor come of age?

Sadly some of it will be more versions of Downton Abbey and what he called ‘high quality TV' and he announced boosts for the creative industries such as TV and video games (does anyone have a video anymore?). He also hopes to get the likes of Disney and HBO to come to these shores to make their programmes. So that will be a case of us importing High School Musical and The Wire, and then exporting Upstairs Downstairs back to America and elsewhere. I'm not sure any of us are getting a good deal.

He committed to supporting world class science and aerospace - so even if UK pharmaceutical companies can't get new drugs approved by the NHS at least they can ship them abroad.

Inevitably aerospace will translate into arms manufacture and we are very good at exporting that. Currently defence is a £12bn industry - a bitter pill for some to swallow but there is money in guns.

And after he set the country on its new road to work in the world, he set about creating a tax system which the average Daily Mail reader would think is fair.

He probably did a good job in fairness by raising the personal allowance closer to his dream of £10,000, and he fiddled about with child benefit so only those where someone earns more than £60,000 won't get anyway.

The much leaked policies of higher stamp duty for ‘mansions' came with a little bit of a surprise. The 15% duty where the property is held in a company was a policy which played well to the gallery and class warriors, as did the 7% on properties valued at £2m or more held by an individual.

The devil is always in the detail with taxation and no doubt there will be a few googlies for higher rate earners above the cap of £50,000 in income tax relief they can now claim in a single year.

Whether he achieves his aim of simplifying tax is anyone's guess but on balance Osborne produced a budget which had a bit for more people in the country.

So he might at last be able to say hand of heart ‘we're all in this together'. He has begun to show a maturity as the man in control of the nation's purse strings which belies his youthful looks and slightly patronising delivery.

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