Two views of reality

Their difficulty comes when they listen to the mood music and then compare it with the reality of economic policy.

Gordon Brown's latest budget, delivered in the Commons by Alistair Darling, was a classic of its kind, promising one thing and then announcing policies that point in a different direction.

Business Secretary John Hutton had already given us a clear indication of how the government views fairness, pleading for the rich to be allowed to become even richer without risking punitive taxation.

He certainly had no problem convincing the Brown-Darling coalition, who plumped for the normal approach of subservience to big business and contempt for working people.

There was no word of a windfall tax on the utilities companies that have increased charges to consumers far above the rate of inflation even after seeing their profits zoom into the stratosphere.

The Chancellor had nothing to say about the failings of privatisation, as in the rail industry, where cowboy privateers continue to live off the fat of the land while service standards plummet.

Nor did he appear to have noticed the case made by rail union RMT to close the loophole whereby deferred tax of about £750 million over a five-year period, which had been marked for investment, was translated into shareholder dividends by train operators and rolling-stock companies.

But he had no difficulty in identifying the need for "discipline" over pay in the public sector as a means of guaranteeing "low and stable inflation."

Mr Darling must know that penalising low-paid public-service workers by staggering below-inflation pay rises has little or no effect on the rate of inflation.

And he must also know that there is no point in playing to the gallery by announcing a showroom tax on 4x4 Chelsea tractors or proposing a flight tax rather than air passenger duty if these fly in the face of other government policies.

Caving in to the airline and construction lobbies by agreeing to concrete over much of southern England to increase Heathrow and Stansted airports exposes these proposals as ineffective fig leaves.

There is no logic in the Chancellor's attempt to attribute inflation around the 2 per cent mark, despite the trebling of energy prices since 2002, to the "success of the monetary policy committee and resilience of the UK economy."

If manufacturing was still a substantial part of Britain's economy, higher fuel prices would have a substantial impact, but it is not, because new Labour has turned its back on manufacturing, accepting the EU commission's designation of this country's main areas of economic activity as pharmaceuticals and overseas services.

The main reason for low inflation in Britain has been low global food prices and the huge influx of cheap manufactured products from China and other Asian markets.

And, far from this being the basis for stability in Britain, it is storing up problems for an economy that has grown on the basis of consumption funded by house-price inflation and, in the long run, unsustainable personal debt.