As football is on everyone's minds today, let me borrow a popular metaphor and say that yesterday's Emergency Budget is a game of two halves – of cutting costs and raising revenue.
You can loosen your belt a notch or two – the UK government is going to borrow £8bn less this year than we first thought. We only need to run up public debt of £155bn instead of £163bn, according to figures from the new Office for Budget Responsibility.
So the CCC (my acronym for the Cameron Clegg Coalition) have set out their budgetary stall. We knew what to expect and small business organisations seem pleased with the Queen's Speech. But the CCC have studiously avoided the awkward question of VAT.
As pre-election fever hots up among the party leaders, take a cold hard look at the future. We could be in line for 'painful' tax rises, says one influential think tank.

Can political parties buy the loyalty of small businesses with some pre-election rivalry? To see what the politicos were offering I did a quick scan of the General Election 2010 stories in the Telegraph in the past week.

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