The Budget 2013: so what did happen?

To be fair to George Osborne, he did not have a great deal of room to manoeuvre based on some pretty gloomy news concerning the economy. The Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR) has once again cut its growth predictions for the next few years and there was more bad news on the deficit front. The fall in the UK's public sector net borrowing - the gap between what the government spends and what it raises in revenues "appears to have stalled" according to the OBR. So when Mr Osborne announced fairly early on in his speech that his Budget would be "broadly, fiscally neutral", we knew t...