[Stockbrokers and their clients have been voting with…]

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Stockbrokers and their clients have been voting with their feet over Howe's budget. The stock market has been plunging ever since.

But no hesitation can be found in the Tory Press.

Unable to resist either the corny pun on Howe's name, or the effect on jobs and prices, the 'pop' papers all settled for some variation of the Express headline "Howe's That?' For good measure the Express had a cartoon of Howe as a wicket keeper, shattering three stumps which symbolise the vices that workers are supposedly imbued with from birth.

The press proclaimed the budget as a revolution. At one and the same time it was a budget to restore "incentives" and a budget which put the tax burden where it belonged' -on the necessities of life bought by the working class.

The tax cuts were hailed as liberating both "the top and bottom ends of tax paying" (Telegraph). Of course, a wage earner on £f48 per week had been liberated' to the tune of £1.48 per week, while the Dear Editor, Being a regular reader of your usually excellent paper and its untiring battle on behalf of a united Workers Republic of Ireland I wish to comment on your article Irish Bombings: A Disastrous Tactic (SP131). company boss on £30,000 had, something more to celebrate,, with a take home increase of roslo a week But the opinions expressed in the press were not economic assessments of the budget so much as political approval for its reactionary aims.

Frances Cairncross in the Guardian rambled on for several hundred words trying to find economic reasons for her belief that "it may even turn out to be a good budget" - before admitting that her assessment was based on her own reactionary political beliefs.

"Perhaps people have become impatient with the shortcomings in British society which have caused our economic decline - with under-valued management, anarchic labour practices, class divisions, too much government and too little individual responsibility"

The Financial Times, however, did have second thoughts. Having at first cautiously approved the budget as a translating of election pledges into practice it began to admit that the problems all lie ahead.

Samuel Brittan, arch-opponent of Treasury economists, commented:

"It is hard to avoid the opinion that the budget has been almost deliberately-drawn up to vindicate those in the Trosein, uha panfidanto au Wire contenty pect a wage freeze next Autumn followed by a return to pay controls."

Malcolm Rutherford same paper said:

"This is a budget of a government determined that its policies will be carried out. The problem is simply that it has got to be shown that it can be done. The budget therefore remains an act of faith.' Summing up the few days following the budget, the FT, in its leader column, poinout that workers had learnt to "respond to militancy", and lamented:

"They are more concerned with their relative places in the heap than with the total and real output available to provide real incomes."

The FT declared that unless 'militancy' could be defeated, the budget's benefits could not be gathered in by the Tories.

The FT is the worried voice of British bosses trembling before the struggles to come.

The 'pop' press has opened its champagne too soon.