So, who speaks up for the poor?

When I was a financial journalist, Budget week was a time of frenetic activity and excitement. I and my colleagues would pore over the red book and talk to city analysts and economists about what the measures announced in an invariably dull speech actually amounted to.

Budgets are always full of bogus statistics, massaged numbers and big claims. This one was is no different. The specious Office for Budget Responsibility, run by one of Mrs T's favourite economists, hardly offers a fig leaf for George Osborne's voodoo numbers.

It's a bad week for the poor. Even on the government's own figures the poorest 10% of the country are the second hardest hit group after the richest 10%. As John Humphries asked Nick Clegg this morning 'why should this group be paying anything?'

We're in a global recession that has been caused by two things. One was a failure of international financial regulatory systems - the IMF, G20, and national governments (including the one that left office here in May). The major cause was free-wheeling banks creating ways of making money for their shareholders on the backs of the world's poor. The rich - for they are still making huge profits and paying enormous bonuses - plunged us into a recession that the poor are now being asked to pay to get us all out of.

The banks were in receipt of getting on for £140bn of direct support plus some £800bn+ of indirect support in the financial markets to keep them from going under - and still they are not lending to small and medium-sized business in anything like the way needed to get us out of the mess we're in.

The cost to them is a paltry £2bn levy announced in this budget. A Robin Hood Tax would have raised £20bn a year, something like a fair contribution from the banking sector for the deficit it's caused.

With VAT rises, a freeze on child benefit, the linking of other benefits to the consistently lower inflation measure, caps on housing benefit (coupled with the disappearance of any target for building affordable homes) and swingeing cuts coming in the public services that the prosperous never have to rely, this was a bad budget day for the poor.

Spare a dime for a poor rich kid

No doubt about it - the budget confirms we're in a big mess. The superlatives that have littered our front pages ram the point home: life's going to be tough and tough for a good while.

But in the midst of all the hand-ringing and talk of going to hell in a handbasket, I have found myself with an uneasy feeling. All the commentary has been about how we, we who have lived beyond our means for the past generation, we who have believed free markets hold the keys to the Kingdom for 30 years, we who have watched our asset values mushroom beyond the dreams of Ozymandias, are going to have to tighten our belts a notch - and it's not fair and someone must be blamed (providing it isn't us).

We are even being asked to feel sorry for those on £150,000 a year or more who will have to pay a touch more tax. Apparently, Kate Moss' tax bill could rise by half a million and Wayne Rooney's by £450,000. I don't begrudge these undoubtedly talented and beautiful people their wedge. But I do wonder what planet some editors and commentators inhabit.

While the super-rich struggle by on £410 a day (if they earn £150,000 a year), a billion people every bit as talented, beautiful and hardworking as Moss and Rooney luxuriate on the princely sum of $1 (about 68p at today's exchange rate).

One had hoped that the credit crunch might function as a wake-up call to us all to take a fresh look at what we value and how we value it. Perhaps it might have prompted us to ask whether there's a better, fairer, more just and equitable, more sustainable way to run the world than we've tried in the past 30 years.

But apparently not. All the talk is about how we get out of this as quickly and as unscathed as possible so we can resume business as normal. and certainly we should do nothing to disturb the fragile rich who apparently will be scared away from our shores if they are asked to contribute just a tiny bit more to the general well-being of everyone.

Yes, the budget was a missed opportunity. But the commentary on it has been as morally vacuous and empty as the statement itself.

The excitement of Budget Day

In my previous life as a financial journalist, Budget Day was a highlight of the year. A long day listening to the chancellor, talking to contacts in the City and adland, finding an angle, writing endless words of analysis, finally going to press around midnight and then seeing your words the following morning, part of the ocean of ink spilled in an effort to interpret what the Chancellor had done.

I still get a frisson of excitement on Budget Day. So I watched Alistair Darling yesterday while I had lunch. It was the dullest speech in living memory - I gather former Chancellor Geofrey How fell asleep in the peers gallery!

And yet it seems to me to be as good a budget as we had any right to hope for. It's good for poor people - despite Nick Clegg's rather snide remarks - in terms of child benefit, tax credits and fuel payments. I would have liked him to be bolder on dealing with the utility companies but I hope he'll return to the fray if in the coming year if they do nothing to end the inequity of the poor paying a higher price per unit for gas and electricity than the rich - that's a scandal.

I think the alcohol tax rises were well balanced and the green initiatives on car pricing and tax rates, though small steps, are steps in the right direction. I'd have quadrupled the VED on Chelsea tractors (while offering a waiver to farmers and those who need four-wheel drives - though the trouble with that is that it removes the incentive to the industry to improve the technology in these vehicles and opens a loophole that some clever accountant will exploit).

I was also pleased that he left gift aid untouched - £300m left in charities and voluntary sector organisations (and, of course, churches). That was a bold statement of commitment to this vital sector of our society.

So all in all, I thought the Chancellor done good - given the bad hand dealt to him by the world economy and some of his predecessor's decisions. We'll see how it plays out in the coming months.