One nation? Not for this Chancellor

SINCE it’s Easter and the Chancellor has been humbly explaining himself to MPs, let’s look at his Budget with our bishop’s mitre on (a mere dogcollar’s not good enough, it’s straight to the top for us).

MPs approved the Budget last week only after George Osborne was forced to shelve planned cuts to disability benefits. Osborne’s original Budget led to the resignation of Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith.

So was IDS right, are we no longer heading for a fairer society where the less well-off are taken care of, or are we still ‘all in it together’?

Well, he has got a point: average annual income of the top 30 per cent of households will be £280 higher after the Budget and that of the bottom 30 per cent will be £565 lower, according to the Resolution Foundation chaired by former Tory Cabinet Minister Lord Willetts.

Osborne has been horribly constrained by restrictions of his own making. He has bet his own political future on eliminating the deficit, but has imposed limitations on himself on how he can do it: the Tories pledged not to cut the NHS, schools or foreign aid and have sworn to keep boosting pensions no matter what.

President Obama ticked off the Prime Minister for getting a ‘free ride’ on defence, so the UK had to boost defence spending. That doesn’t leave much to cut to tackle the deficit.

Add cuts to Government revenues from lower corporation tax and the elimination of tax for large swathes of small businesses and you get IDS storming out in high dudgeon over cuts to the disabled. One Nation Toryism it ain’t. So this Easter, then, we won’t tip our hat to the Chancellor after all. OVER four decades, Bernie Ecclestone has taken what was almost a weekend hobby for a few well-heeled enthusiasts and turned Formula 1 into one of the biggest sporting spectacles on the planet.

Now it’s a business that someone might be prepared to pay $8.5billion (£6billion) to take control of – see our story on the previous page. Ecclestone still owns a stake in the company which runs it and might even increase it, he says in our interview on page 83. But it is the US venture capital firm CVC which will have cashed in mightily since it bought its controlling stake in the firm which runs F1, called Delta Topco, for $2billion in 2006.

It halved its stake to its present level, garnering $4.4billion in the process, and has benefited from soaring profits in recent years and now is looking at an $8.5billion payday. Ecclestone is a controversial figure, but there are few businessmen who can claim to have been as successful.