Ever wonder who won the general election?

If you do, don’t. Judging by this government’s first budget, Labour scored a resounding victory.

No, not that, unelectable Labour. The victors were photogenic exponents of the same ideas lightly camouflaged with mock-Tory cant.

Today’s papers are full of encomiums for Chancellor Sunak’s budget speech. He’s praised for his brio, inspired (and phonetically demotic) rhetoric and Blairesque charisma. Mr Sunak is already talked about as Johnson’s successor – all on the basis of his one month in office and one rousing speech.

Personally, I’d prefer a droning delivery of sound economic policy to yesterday’s histrionic rendition of an economic suicide note. For, rather than offering, as he claimed, any new answers, Mr Sunak ignored all the answers provided and amply proved by the whole history of economics.

His speech had nothing to do with economics and all to do with politics. By enunciating socialist economic policies, his Labour Lite effectively defanged Labour Full Strength.

The Tory budget will increase our sovereign debt to at least £2 trillion by 2025. What’s Labour Full Strength going to offer now? Another trillion? Two?

The new budget is designed for immediate political effect, and in that sense it is indeed a masterstroke. A combination of runaway spending and promiscuous borrowing strikes an optimistic note at crisis time – it’s a fiscal feast in the time of plague. 

The rationale provided for this orgy of borrow-spend-tax is that borrowing is now cheap because the interest rates are at an all-time low. Now, unless Mr Sunak has a direct line to the god of money markets, how can he be sure that interest rates will stay that way?

Did he learn anything from the 2008 crisis, largely precipitated by a glut of cheap mortgages on subprime rates that all went into default when the interest rates edged up? Taking the economy with them? No, apparently not.

And even assuming that the rates do stay low for the lifetime of this parliament, the absolute sums of repayments are staggering. Taxes will have to go up, with the economy heading in the opposite direction, as it always does when squeezed by state extortion.

A great deal of the trillion-pound budget proposed by the government has to do with ‘investment’ in infrastructure. Effectively that means punitive taxation on the productive Peter in the economy and a transfer of the funds to the incompetent Paul.

For governmental meddling in the economy is incompetent by definition. “The moment that Government appears at market, all the principles of market will be subverted,” wrote Burke, and he has been vindicated by the subsequent 200-odd years of economic history the world over. A state doesn’t invest – it spends, and the money for this exercise is siphoned out of the economy.

If the chancellor is inspired by Roosevelt’s TVA and Hoover Dam or Hitler’s autobahns, he should analyse those vast ‘infrastructure investments’ more closely. He’ll find out that their ‘boosterism’ (today’s Tory neologism) spelled strictly short-termism.

No one will begrudge the chancellor the £30 billion, effectively a blank cheque, allocated to fighting the consequences of the coronavirus pandemic. Desperate times, desperate measures and all that. At a time of national emergency, all hands ought to be on deck, not on the abacus.

It is, however, useful to remember that the modern state seldom relinquishes what it has claimed. Grabbing extra powers for itself in the time of war, economic crisis or murderous pandemic, it tends to keep hold of those powers after the situation improves.

The statist policies adopted by most Western states in the wake of the two world wars, the Great Depression or the Spanish flu pandemic persevered in the aftermath. The result has been a gradual but ineluctable transfer of power to the central state at the expense of local bodies and individuals.

That, if we ignore the attendant bien pensant waffle, is the essence of socialism. And, this side of concentration camps, its prime power tool is a tax-and-spend economy, diminishing individual enterprise and therefore increasing dependence on the state.

The claim that adding a few seconds to our broadband connections or subtracting an hour from a London-to-Manchester train ride would boost productivity is irrelevant if true.

Actually, I doubt it’s true because a highly educated and motivated workforce is a sine qua non for a marked rise in productivity. And such a force is created by education that educates, rather than providing an arena for social engineering.

That is demonstrably lacking in Britain. However, even assuming against logic and historical evidence that the government ‘investment’ does produce a 2-3 per cent increase in productivity, the effects will take a full generation to trickle down into the economic mainstream. By that time the economy, emaciated by Tory (or subsequent Labour) socialism will be a basket case.

So forgive me if I don’t add my voice to the chorus of panegyrics for Mr Sunak and his budget. It’s not so much an economic plan as a recipe for disaster.