All fur coats as Darling goes window dressing

Listening to some of the coverage on the TV and radio and reading several of the reports the following day you could be forgiven for thinking it's already in the bag. One item, in particular, struck me as especially surreal. I almost drove off the road as I heard a commentator on the BBC say that the hikes in booze and fags were going to help alleviate child poverty.

You've got to be joking. As someone who once worked in a pub and witnessed the same sad procession of boozers spending their meagre incomes and not heading home to be with their wives and kids the idea they will be deterred by an extra 4p on a pint is laughable. Likewise, cigarettes. All the increases will mean is that the hard-pressed missus will have a bit less in the housekeeping. If anything it will consign more children towards poverty. If the Government is serious it should put the duties up by an amount that really will make a difference.

That, however, is not how this Government works. It's a collection of tinkerers and window-dressers who put on a show which is lapped up, when the underlying reality is very different. How many times, for instance, was the word "enterprise" used by Darling? Five. It's one of Labour's recurring themes, how they're going to build an enterprise culture, blah blah.

This time we got a £12.5 million fund to encourage women entrepreneurs.

Cue applause from the ranks of women MPs on the benches behind him. That's right: £12.5 million. I don't know about you but if you have less, it's harder to spend it. How do you hand out grants when all you have is a measly £12.5 million? How many start-ups is that going to help in any meaningful way? Not many, is the answer.

But this whole area of women and enterprise is one of non-delivery anyway, so another pathetic measure won't make a difference. One of the most telling differences between here and the US is the amount of women over there who run their own businesses. This comes up time and again in ministerial fact-finding missions.

Indeed, Gordon Brown decided to do something about it when he set up the "women's enterprise task force" (Budget 2006, to save you looking it up). It must be a hoot sitting on such a body.

I'd like to tell you the list of achievements of the women's enterprise task force, or WET for short, how often it meets, what it discusses. Sadly, its website is lacking in such useful detail. In fact, the impression that is easily formed is of a body that was put together to answer a need - the Chancellor's for talking the talk. Looking down its list of members I searched in vain for anybody I'd heard of, a Scardino or a Horlick, but they're notably absent.

There's the head of something called Social Enterprise London, another who is the boss of "the independent association of organisations committed to the development of women's entrepreneurial potential in the UK" and one who is a director of the entrepreneurship centre at the University of Stirling (doubtless soon, they can all get jobs teaching at the new National Enterprise Academy, announced last week by the Prime Minister).

In business terms, they're all fur coat and no knickers. Which, when you think about it, also sums up the Budget 2008 rather nicely.