For those who wanted Campbell's response, here it is from my members e-mail:
And no I haven't read it yet. Life is too short!
(Unlike the message)
This is the Chancellor’s tenth Budget – he has a particular affinity for number ten.
The truth is that this is a tired budget from a Chancellor who has run out of steam, treading water, waiting for his next job.
Let’s take a look at his legacy:
Levels of inequality in incomes and wealth worse than under Mrs. Thatcher;
A pensions system in crisis;
A trillion pounds worth of consumer debt;
Complacency on a threatened environment; and
A Treasury which can’t even manage its own tax credits system.
The economy remains, in some key respects, healthy, but there is no room for complacency and no room for ignoring medium and long-term challenges.
As a fellow Scottish radical, let me return to the issue of inequality. The wealthiest 1% own 23% of assets - higher than 1997 - while the poorest 50% own only 6% - lower than 1997.
The top 20% of earners pay less of their income in tax than the bottom 20%, while the tax system remains unfair and vastly overcomplicated.
Why does the Chancellor tinker with the tax system when it is so fundamentally unfair and requires radical reform?
And every time he tinkers, he adds layer upon layer of complexity – an incitement to fraud.
The most unfair, regressive tax of all remains the Council Tax.
But the lack of proper reform to Council Tax is not the only failure to act in the realm of taxation.
Green taxes have fallen as a share of overall taxation under this Government and the measures that the Chancellor has announced today are little more than a token gesture.
Simplicity is needed in environmental taxation.
We need a proper system of green economic incentives: incentives that encourage people to change the way they live - and ensure that the polluter pays.
Under this Chancellor, the polluter isn’t paying. The bare fact is that CO2 emissions are higher than they were in 1997, and they are continuing to rise.
The Chancellor prepared the ground well in the pre-Budget Report - conceding the error of his growth predictions, changing the economic cycle, raising taxes and acknowledging a slowdown in public spending growth.
The Chancellor has put the spending review back to next year and gained a breathing space.
With the spending plans penciled in at the pre-Budget report, the Government will be announcing real terms cuts in most departments next year.
And with public spending, despite all the extra investment, it’s still not reaching the frontline.
Treasury targets have led to NHS Trusts cutting waiting lists at all costs – and cutting care in other areas.
There is a need for tough choices, for spending priorities.
We are committed to them, such as:
Cutting back on DTI industrial subsidies, such as those given to the nuclear power industry;
Arguing the case on the baby bond scheme that the money would be much better spent on early years education now than a bond in the future; and
Opposing identity cards – and opposing the millions of pounds spent on the unnecessary and unworkable identity card scheme.
The British people wanted better public services and were willing to pay for them. What they simply don’t understand is how so much has been spent with so little to show for it - with operations cancelled, with wards closed and local hospitals threatened with closure and even nurses being made redundant.
It is clear that politically what is required is to restore trust in fiscal policy.
It could have been achieved by widening the remit of the National Audit Office, to provide transparent and independent scrutiny of all budget assumptions and forecasts.
Just as he eventually accepted our advice on the Bank of England I trust that Gordon Brown will take our advice on this too.
There is another issue that we Liberal Democrats have been raising for some time – the potential hazards of this country’s rising consumer debt.
Consumer debt is now approaching £1.2 trillion – which is practically identical to the gross domestic product for the United Kingdom as a whole.
Consumer debt has driven the Chancellor’s boom – but the legacy for many families could be disaster. Nearly a fifth of family incomes is being used to service debts. This means it is back to the level it was when the economy crashed under the Tories in the early 1990s.
The immediate signs of stress are clear: rising bankruptcies and rising repossessions.
The other side of the coin of the rise in personal debt and the decline in personal savings is the poor recent record of private business investment.
Under current leadership, the CBI has been a great deal more supportive of this Government than in previous years, but I suspect they will react to this Budget more in sadness than anger, to the way in which mindless regulation and excessive tax complexity are squeezing entrepreneurship out of British business and this Budget does nothing to change that.
Enlightened British companies understand the need to pay taxes for investment in education and infrastructure; what they don’t understand is why those taxes don’t deliver the goods.
This Budget has also failed to deal with another of the most glaring issues before us today – the crisis in pensions.
Last week we learned that the Government would not follow the Ombudsman’s recommendations and compensate those who have lost out by believing government information.
The Ombudsman said the Government had provided information that was ‘inaccurate, incomplete, unclear and inconsistent’.
If an independent report had made a similar judgment about the actions of the Tory Government when the Chancellor was in opposition, his wrath would have been wondrous to behold.
There is a broad consensus of agreement around the recent report by Adair Turner on all sides of the House. There is a blueprint for pension reform that is available and should be implemented. It seems to be only the Treasury that stands in the way.
This Budget was an opportunity. In a period of relative stability with low inflation and stable employment, the Chancellor had an opportunity to show his worth.
He could have tackled the unfair tax system; he could have made the environment a priority; he could have faced up to the pensions crisis; indeed he could have faced up to his responsibilities.
He has declined to do so.