High earners to pay 45%

Today, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair Darling will not be giving the details of a pre-budget report. Today will be a full blown budget designed to help stimulate an economy that the bankers, mainly, have pulled into recession.

In some ways the 2.5% off VAT and a new tax rate of 45% for high earners is fairly small beer. Certainly I am not convinced that 50p off the price of a 20 quid jumper is going to get the engines turning again. The other measures, including additional tax relief for low income families, are more likely to pump cash rather than credit back into the economy.

But in one major respect, today's budget will be the most important since Labour first switched priorities from private tax cuts to public service investment in 1997.

Suddenly an ocean of clear blue water has opened between Labour and David Cameron's neo-cons. Unusually, Alistair Darling has summed this up rather neatly. He said, "I despair of people who say in a moment of difficulty facing the country there's nothing we can do. It's back to [Thatcher's] idea that unemployment is a price worth paying."

None of this, however, will bring forward the date of the General Election which will be in May 2010. The Prime Minister should break another out of date, useless tradition and announce 4 May 2010 as the date immediately after today's budget.