The opinions of John Blunt are not necessarily those of this newspaper

THE Budget, at first widely hailed as the highest example yet of Chancellor Gordon Brown's brilliance, has turned out to be like the fairy story about the emperor praised by fools for his fine robes when he was actually walking about in the buff.

It was, as I predicted, a stinker.

For a start, where's the 20p tax rate gone - while everyone's blinded by a penny cut (next year) in the basic 23p rate?

Where's the support for the traditional family - when the married couples' allowance and mortgage tax relief is axed?

Own a car as well as a house and you're soaked good and proper. And if you are daft enough to smoke, you say goodbye to the benefit you get from the new 10p income tax rate almost before you finish your first pack of 20.

But while, for all the complex disguises, we can expect this socialist trick of redistribution of wealth at the expense of the middle classes that Labour now pretends to love, will the government explain why it is exporting jobs by the thousand to the continent by making lorry taxes and fuel so expensive that, as with the wholesale bootlegging of booze and tobacco, it's cheaper for haulage firms to buy their road tax and diesel on the continent and put thousands of British employees out of work?

Surely, this is the Budget's biggest clanger - and, despite the denials Tony Blair delivers through his grin, proof that, under Labour, taxes have gone up by stealth while he insists they are coming down.

The traffic heading one-way to Europe and across the border from Ulster to Eire to fill up and pack up is visible proof of what a bodge this Budget is.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.