Marcus Wood

Labour slump in first post-budget poll

In todays Telegraph poll the gap between Labour and the Tories has grown by 2% since the Budget on Wednesday.

What a high price Gordon Brown is paying for a few seconds of discomfort for David Cameron.

It really beggars belief that a supposed genius should craft his entire Budget, the backbone of economic policy for the nation for the next twelve months, on the basis of a two-second finale aimed at wrong-footing his political opponent.

It worked initially, but like so many other Gordon Brown initiatives, it has unravelled within days.

Instead of being seen as a reforming chancellor he is viewed with suspicion and mistrust that -according to the polls- matches and even exceeds the mistrust the public hold for Tony Bliar.

And the real problems this budget will add to are only just beginning to peep from under the political hyperbole.

An unprecedented shift for low income earners away from keeping them out of the tax system and instead snaring them in a hand out dependency culture - the very opposite of what they need.

An attack on the profits of small business, the very people on whom Gordon Brown has depended to keep the economy motoring, and a tax hand-out to anonymous global corporations like BP, Shell and HSBC.

Gordon Brwon apparently treats his cabinet peers with contempt but clearly imagines the public are even more stupid than his Government colleagues.

Luckily they aren’t. Is it any wonder his poll ratings have slumped?