stop laying frankel and big buck's then.

I don't. I'm saying it's a strange budget to come up with. It seems, on first glance to be a perfect set of media soundbites for the opposition, as if they've turned a shotgun on their face and offered Milliband the trigger. I'm not suggesting the media should portray it any differently.

OK fair enough.

By the way, the biggest bullet in the gun is probably the change to the pensioners personal tax allowances. The higher ones you automatically get once you retire which increases again when you hit 75.

These are going to be frozen for existing pensioners and scrapped completely for people who retire from now on.

What is means is between now and 2016/17 tax year the treasury will save £3.3bn off the backs of pensioners paying more tax. This will go toward the cost of paying for the increase in personal allowance for working people.

The paper and the opposition ought to rip them apart over this. Robbing pensioners to pay for tax breaks to the rest of us?

And this was after that stuff about older people working longer because it keeps them from getting lonely, right?

Isn't it the classic "Do all you're nasty stuff in the first three budgets, then have two popular ones" strategy?

Could well be. Get it out of the way and just let it all descend into a tit for tat arguement that the public loses interest in, then pop £0.10 off fuel duty and raise benefits before the election.

If everyone's tax is spent in the same way, and you'd have to assume it would be, a simple web application would do it. i.e. if x% goes on defence and y% on the NHS, the app could just use your tax paid figure and split it up. With a bit more work it could do the same from your personal details and NI number.

£4?

Yet another reason why you should live in Bradford mate

A good example of why the 50% rate is being reduced, there are parallels between the two taxes.

Nice of the government to pretend that the price of beer is not going up when in fact its going up by 5.4% a pint. 2% plus rate of inflation

Noticed Osbourne did not once utter the phrase " were all in this together ", but all the front bench of millionaires blushed when Milliband asked them to nod if they were now to get a 5% tax cut. Hypocrites

According to the further detail now published on the HMRC website, these statements will only be available to customers who submit their tax returns online. So presumably it will just be an extra option once you log on to SA Online.

So if you're a PAYE employee or submit your returns on paper, you're probably not going to get one.

Fag machines already gone from our local pubs....

So it's even more y crapitude than it initially appeared?

As if that were possible ...

Smoke rollies. Player's Gold. It costs me about a tenner every fortnight to smoke.

If someone on £1 million gets no salary rise next year, the will still have an inflation busting 4.25% rise JUST with the tax cut.

With pay freezes for the poorest, increase tax burden on the pensioners who have a modest works pension, cutting of benefits and other measures targeting the poorest, is it suprising even this thick public school oaf has the savvy not to use the phrase.

You could give up and donate the money to the chancellor to plug the loopholes in the tax system for the rich.

Oh, no forgot, they are volunteering to stop using them which will pay for the loss of £3 billion Gideon has just given them.

Good - it would only go in the recycling bin. When we have no control over what happens between elections it hardly seems worth telling us what the money is being spent on. No amount of ing and moaning will stop it happening (e.g. War in Iraq, NHS changes, welfare changes)

I thought someone might have commented on the Automatic Review of the State Pension age. Does this mean putting my pension age to 67 or more since they last put it up from 65 to 66 last year. Sorry I forgot we are all living to 100 plus. Not where I live they arnt

Tell you what, it's not a brag, but I'm bloody glad I gave up eight weeks ago. And the driving force behind that was the cost - specifically, being charged over £9 at Glasgow airport last November - even though i'm fortunate enough that it wouldn't be a make or break cost.

But, yet again, who suffers most? It's almost as if they're actually saying that anyone who isn't already wealthy or on a very good whack can go swivel.

I don't know about anyone else, but I'm in danger of running out of adjectives to describe this lot. I wasn't much impressed with Labour in general (and detested Blair specifically), hated Thatcher etc, but this lot ... Well, their quite obvious sheer nastiness seems to know no bounds. And they're barely even trying to hide it.

That's because they're banned (unless behind the bar where customers can't get at them)

I wave my yellow fingers at you, sir.

Stick with it, Minty! I quit about 6 years ago (like you, due to cost) and whenever I go into a shop I look at the price of the fags just to remind myself what a good move it was.

Quote ="fargrange1"Noticed Osbourne did not once utter the phrase " were all in this together ", but all the front bench of millionaires blushed when Milliband asked them to nod if they were now to get a 5% tax cut. Hypocrites '" I imagine that a few in the Shadow Cabinet are feeling pleased at their tax cut tonight too. order-order.com/2010/10/11/shado ... lionaires/ "Millionaire Ed Miliband inherited a share of a multi-million pound property from his Marxist father, some nifty footwork by him and his brother David allowed them to avoid paying six-figure inheritance taxes. Combining marital assets and his inheritance from his father Ralph, Ed himself is comfortably a millionaire."

Quote ="fargrange1"Noticed Osbourne did not once utter the phrase " were all in this together ", but all the front bench of millionaires blushed when Milliband asked them to nod if they were now to get a 5% tax cut. Hypocrites '" I imagine that a few in the Shadow Cabinet are feeling pleased at their tax cut tonight too. order-order.com/2010/10/11/shado ... lionaires/ "Millionaire Ed Miliband inherited a share of a multi-million pound property from his Marxist father, some nifty footwork by him and his brother David allowed them to avoid paying six-figure inheritance taxes. Combining marital assets and his inheritance from his father Ralph, Ed himself is comfortably a millionaire."

You must be an occasional smoker, my granddads were almost black with his Capstan full strength