THE ‘deliberately conservative’ Budget presented today has an air of the surreal. While being frank in its acceptance that these are tough times, it makes the case for doing not very much at all.

Wait-and-see proposals broadly turn their back on the elephant in the room that is the looming deficit. With zero-10 put through the shredder by its opponents in Europe, Treasury says it cannot act decisively until a new tax policy is in place.

So, despite an annual structural deficit of £40m. and expenditure outstripping revenue by £5m., this exercise in treading water offers little solace that a lifeboat is on the horizon. Essentially, islanders must look instead to a revised corporate tax system for salvation.

Yet, beyond brief mention of a 10% company tax rate, Treasury’s proposals offer little to cool brows fevered by plummeting revenue and an expenditure which the States accepts will not go down any time soon.

Is it then a Budget to ignore? A bunch of facts and figures that are of interest only to accountants and actuaries.

Regrettably, no.

For while we may live in macro-economic times where Guernsey must tear up costly tax strategies overnight, there is enough in the micro-detail to make most families wince.

This particularly applies to those who smoke, drink, drive a car or own property. Or, heaven forbid, all four.

For them, the Budget is far from an irrelevance. The attack on smokers’ pockets that began life as a purely health-driven policy has now been intensified ‘for fiscal reasons’.

Hence, while a hike of RPI plus 3% in the price of cigarettes and cigars can be put down to the health lobby, the remainder of the 15% hike is good old-fashioned tax.

Similarly alcohol, another target of the health lobby, gets a whopping 15% extra duty on wines and spirits. Over five years that’s an 84% rise in duty alone.

Petrol also gets the 15% treatment. This time it’s for ‘sound environmental, social and fiscal [tax] reasons’. And tax on property escapes, for some reason, with ‘just’ a 10% hike.

A Budget to ignore? Far from it.