Today, in the chill London spring, a leathery, battered container was hoisted aloft, and swayed unsteadily in the air outside Number 11, Downing St. His name was Alistair Darling, he’s the chancellor of the exchequer, and he had some old suitcase in his hand too. The smile on his face suggested he was going far, far away. Ha ha you fuckers, he appeared to be saying, I’m pissing off. I’m flying to Vilnius for a stag night. You deal with it.

But it was not to be. Instead he went to Parliament, and delivered the last budget of the first and possibly only Brown government. Budgets are usually boring, but the pre-election budget of a government in trouble is usually audacious, inventive, anything but boring.

This one was boring.

Darling did not deliver a bribe-a-thon (feels weird to use darling as a surname, feels like saying “Sweetie was very prudent”), but nor did he bring down a ‘Roy Jenkins’ named for the late 70s budget of the Lib-Lab coalition, which instituted a range of cuts (as mandated by the IMF), thus possibly losing the last opportunity to forestall the creaking advance of the Iron Lady.

Instead the essence of the budget was to give the appearance of responding to the demands of the financial crisis and recession which has hit the UK harder than most, while also judiciously avoiding inflicting any pain on those groups that might be inclined to vote against it.

The startling thing about the budget was that there was no single large instrument, change or reform at all. There was fiddling with stamp duty, fags and booze taxes and other bits and bobs, but the core stimulus wasn’t even state spending at all – it was the mandating of a further £92 billion in lending by high street banks, who effectively have no choice but to do what the government says after their bail-out.

The wodge is money they would otherwise sit on, and in the UK’s reduced state, one would presume that some of it will go on dodgy loans (as opposed to the process when the banks had their head, when all of it went on dodgy loans).

Otherwise, most of the maneouvres were clearly political. Trying to keep a straight face, Sweetie-Honey announced that stamp duty would be abolished on all homes under £250,000, up from £125,000 – a move that gained hooting and jeering from the Opposition benches as it’s been their policy for yonks. Labour added a hike in stamp duty on £1m+ homes, which had them quieter.

The other move that quietened the Tories was an announcement of reciprocal tax arrangement with three previous havens – Dominica*, Grenada and – and Darling had to steady himself here – Belize, the last of these, the ostensible home and more or less personal property of Tory vice-chairman Michael Ashcroft who pays tax there, while living in London.

That was nicely done.

But none of these measures answered the question begged by the big figures, the proposed reduction of £60bn in borrowing over the next three years, and a winding down of the deficit from 11.8% to 5.2% over the next four years, that question being whatthef— how? It’s not going to be the 10% tax hike on cider, a crowd-pleasing move that will push the price of a jumbo bottle of White Lightning up by 15p, thus merely ensuring that toothless junkies skimp on the nappies.

No, it’s efficiencies of course. Quite ludicrous efficiencies, surreal beyond the usual bullshit claim of efficiencies – hundreds of millions in reduction of absenteeism in the NHS, a reduction in consultancies blah blah. These things are always nonsense of course, but the current crop is so surreal, as to elicit the same sort of ennui as hearing a child reciting numbers – ‘eleventy seven, ninenety nine’ – or a child doing anything really.

Everyone knows that this budget doesn’t apply operationally. Should the Tories get in, they will attack the poor and subsidise wind turbines on weekend homes, and should Labour cling to its largest-party status, it will have to re-do the thing entirely under Lib-Dem tutelage – and they will demand actual targeted cuts and real tax rises to knock down the deficit.

Interestingly one measure caught my attention – the establishment of a ‘basic bank account’, the right of everyone to have a bank account. You don’t have a right to a bank account? No, other than in the most formal sense you don’t. Prior to Thatcher, the class nature of the UK was such that banking remained a middle class professional preserve, and the working class had a Post Office account, or a trade union savings account or similar.

Then the banking system was deregulated, allowing everyone to have a bank account. So the post office etc accounts were withdrawn – and then the banks started getting the poor off their lists by raising the charges on low deposit holders.

Thus Labour, in its best problem-solving third-way practical social democratic tradition, identified a problem and decided something must be done. In 1998. Yes, this problem came to light twelve years ago. Twelve years in which millions of people have had to go through the demeaning hell of pleading for a bank account, or getting their account closed down, or having to go to a payday lender to cash a cheque.

It wasn’t the only thing done that should have happened a decade ago. The budget also included a £2bn high end manufacturing industry fund, another pathetic stop-gap to address what has been happening for a quarter of a century — basic industry disappearing without being replaced by high end manufacture. For a decade these clowns put their faith in the market, and continental Europe raced ahead of them.

But it was the bank thing that really struck, because it was so easy, and cost free. Why didn’t it happen? Because Labour spent its whole time sucking up to the banks, as the ‘engines of endogenous growth’, and the banks didn’t want these deadbeats clogging their books. It could’ve been done with a stroke of the pen. Now it’s being used to enhance the government’s image as a giant-killer.

Darling announced this startling plan, surrounded, as speakers at the despatch box are always surrounded at such moments, by the front bench packed tightly together on the bench. On these occasions, parties wear their colours, and the Tories were a sea of blue, Labour a sea of…purple. Yes, purple was the colour, a bit of red and a bit of blue combining to create the hue of aristocratic privilege. Very chic. Very darling, very new Labour, the empty battered container moving on.