The Budget

"Hear! Hear!" cried the Honorable Members last week, as Chancellor of the Exchequer Hugh Gaitskell rose in the House of Commons to open the budget for 1951-52. At -L-4.2 billion ($11.8 billion), it was the biggest budget in Britain's peacetime history. From the dark red dispatch box that was once William Gladstone's, Gaitskell drew the closely guarded pages of his speech. He spoke crisply for 2 1/4 hours, refreshed himself with occasional sips of rum-spiked orange juice. M.P.s listened intently; throughout the country, people waited anxiously.

The gist of the Chancellor's message: higher taxes and continued austerity are necessary, to pay for rearmament and to keep the welfare state afloat. More than a third of Britain's budget will go for rearmament ($4.2 billion, compared to $4.5 billion to be spent on social services), a defense outlay second only to the U.S.'s among the twelve Atlantic pact members./-

Said Gaitskell: "The setting [of the budget] is the clash . . . between the two great forces in the world today--between Soviet imperialism on the one side, and the parliamentary democracies on the other ... We have to recognize that there must be some reduction in our standard of living."

The Chancellor spread the burden as "widely and thinly" as possible. Income tax will take 2.5% more of everybody's income after personal exemptions. There will also be higher sales and entertainment taxes, and a jump from 30% to 50% on distributed business profits. He rejected left-wing demands for a soak-the-rich capital levy. Biggest surprise of all, he defied his fiery cabinet colleague Aneurin Bevan by proposing that the public pay half the cost of false teeth and spectacles, hitherto free under the National Health Service.

Opposition Leader Winston Churchill complimented the well-groomed, auburn-haired Chancellor on his "lucid, comprehensive statement . . . and evident lack of hatred or malice . . ." Tories would scrutinize the details and heckle the Labor government wherever they could in the coming budgetary debate, but privately they admitted that it was "a damn good budget--we'd have had to include most of his points if it had been our budget."

/- Proposed U.S. military budget for the 1951 fiscal year: $48 billion.

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