Under orders

Some might say A Budget for votes, but the best description is A Budget for getting the vote out.

Yesterday, Gordon Brown fired the starting pistol for the 2001 Election Stakes and, with wave after wave of spending details to wash over us in forthcoming days, we are now galloping towards the finishing tape of May 3.

And, at last, Mr Brown believes he will have the backing of the punters in the Labour heartlands. Over the months, as Labour has become an odds-on certainty to win the General Election, those heartlands had become a mite disillusioned and were considering not bothering to vote. So Mr Brown unveiled A Budget for getting the vote out, a Budget to keep everyone interested.

Lower-paid families were offered a little hope and a little money, pensioners were given a glimmer of a rise, areas where coal, steel and textiles were once major employers received a suggestion of regeneration.

The heartlands were the backbone of Labour's success in 1997; women created the landslide. The touchy-feely youthful energy of Tony Blair appealed more to them than their male counterparts. And so Mr Brown conceived his "babies not business" Budget to get their vote out, too.

But, cunningly, no one was clobbered. Most working people will be 60p a week better off through the income tax changes. Most will save a couple of pennies on their fuel. Drinkers will be amazed that their tipples are no more expensive. Smokers will be stunned that they've only been hit by a rise equal to inflation.

And no one can complain at the prospect of pensioners getting a fiver, or at a further billion each being thrown at education and health.

In fact, Mr Brown hopes that, by the end of the week, everyone will be considerably better off. Riding his favourite horse called Prudence, he nodded to the Old Labour elements in the crowd but did very little to frighten the horses belonging to the Bank of England interest rate committee in the paddock. The committee's monthly meeting will probably conclude today that such was the caution of the Budget, interest rates are able to fall a little further - and for those living in Middle England with a big mortgage, that is as good as a penny off income tax.

Even William Hague struggled to criticise with any real venom. Even his best gag - "he is a thief who steals your car and comes back the next morning to return the hub-caps" - admitted that the Budget had cut tax.

There will now be much huffing and puffing about whether the overall tax take has gone up during Mr Brown's stewardship. The Conservatives claim that 45 stealth taxes have snaffled an additional £36bn; Mr Brown claimed yesterday that tax take has fallen from 21 per cent in 1997 to 18 per cent next year. The truth is probably somewhere between the two - Mr Brown gave away £4bn yesterday, which means the tax burden is about the same as when he started.

None of yesterday's proceedings will have surprised anyone. Since Peter Mandelson's sudden demise, Mr Brown is in sole control of Labour's election campaign. He knows that apathy, and not Tories, is the biggest obstacle to a Labour re-election.

It was no surprise that he was stealthily redistributive - helping the poor slightly more than the rich. By doing this, Mr Brown continued at his own steady pace towards his long-term goals, like halving child poverty by 2010. Such goals require a third Labour victory. Who, above all, would be the beneficiary of that - Mr Brown, of course, because by then Mr Blair will surely have tired and the Chancellor of the Exchequer will be unassailable as his successor.

It was no surprise that he phased in many of his ideas over a number of years - like increased maternity benefit and paternity leave, which will not come into force until 2003. This time-honoured delaying tactic will enable him to reap the rewards of several re-announcements.

It was no surprise that Mr Brown, a master of minutiae, admitted to having scoured every Budget in the last century looking for mentions of children. He admitted to finding none - unsurprisingly because help for children is traditionally done by the social services and health departments and not by fiscally-minded Chancellors. Yet Mr Brown is a Chancellor who likes the Treasury to control everything, and now children have been taken under his munificent wing.

Indeed, such were the lack of surprises that in another era, Mr Brown would have been handing in his resignation for allowing so many of his Budget secrets to leak out. Everything, apart from the VAT break for church repairs, was trailed in quite conspicuous detail - although the promised VAT exemption for cycle helmets failed to materialise.

In the end, as he sat down after just 54 minutes, the only surprise was that there were no surprises. Nothing to scare the City nor to frighten the horses. Perhaps it is a measure of Labour's confidence that it feels it does not need an ostentatious bribe to win the Election.

The House of Commons, having read nearly every detail in the previous week's papers, was strangely subdued as Mr Brown came to his conclusion: "In total over the next three years £1bn more to our hospitals and £1bn more to our schools - money that we could not provide if we made irresponsible tax cuts. We have made our choice: more investment not less; stability the foundation; tax cuts we can afford; schools and hospitals first. And I commend this Budget to this House."

Perhaps it was just the shock of a Labour government for the first time in living memory not reaching the end of its term in financial disarray, having spent beyond its means in its first two years.

Or perhaps it was the enormity of a paragraph that came early in the statement. In November, Mr Brown said that by April 2001, the Government's surplus - the amount it has left over in its coffers after it has paid all its bills - would be £14bn. Because low unemployment has increased tax revenues and because some departments are having difficulty spending all of their allocations, most commentators thought it would be nearer £16bn. But yesterday Mr Brown said it was a whopping £23bn.

And he went on: "I can tell the House that this year the net cash debt repayment will be £34bn: more debt repaid by one British government in one year than all the total debt repaid by all the previous British governments of the last 50 years."

It was so staggering that Mr Blair, sitting beside the Chancellor, was almost beside himself. His face red, his cheeks puffed out, he looked fit to burst.

Here was a Labour government presiding over the longest period of inflation-free growth for 30 years and now Mr Brown, more like a highwayman than a jockey, was stealing the Tories' cherished mantle as the good housekeepers, the party to which the nation traditionally turns to sort out its finances.

It will take a fall as mysterious, unforeseen and dramatic as Devon Loch's in the 1956 Grand National to unseat New Labour in the 2001 Election Stakes.