HAROLD Macmillan once described Budget Day as “rather like a school speech day – a bit of a bore, but there it is”. Don’t be fooled, though. Macmillan was a Tory Chancellor in the 1950s but he only pretended his Budgets were a yawn. His old buffer act was a deliberate ploy to mislead political opponents, while razor-sharp, devious Super Mac did what he wanted with the economy.

Sadly, there was little of Harold Macmillan’s panache or guile in Philip Hammond’s Budget effort yesterday. Spreadsheet Phil wasn’t pretending to be boring – he really was sending the Commons to sleep. The Chancellor entered the chamber with even the fruit and nuttiest of Tory Brexiteers demanding an expansionary, “go for broke” Budget that said adieu to a decade of failed austerity. Instead we got a confetti of small-time, worthy gimmicks designed to hide Hammond’s total failure to press the growth button.

True, there was the “big” announcement on housebuilding, though most of the detail had been heavily leaked. The Chancellor proposed a target of boosting annual house construction to circa 300,000 units by the mid-2020s. Of course, this is not Phil’s own idea. Rather, it is Theresa May’s bid to give her remaining time in office some purpose. So how realistic is this target?

For starters, we haven’t built 300,000 homes a year since the 1960s. And we only did it then because local authorities were big builders. In fact, the record for housebuilding was under the aforementioned Harold Macmillan, who kept a giant scorecard in his office showing the number of houses completed. Macmillan let local councils build to the maximum and helped them borrow cheaply to do so. Unless we do that, the 300,000 figure is a joke.

The bottleneck today in house construction lies with the private volume builders, who hoard land to bump up prices and profits. A 2015 investigation revealed that the UK’s biggest housebuilders were sitting on 600,000 plots of land with planning permission, while the four biggest companies in the industry were paying £1.5 billion in dividends to their shareholders. But the Chancellor knows this – he was a property developer himself. Hammond’s plethora of new financial incentives won’t change things and certainly not by 2025. What is needed is state intervention.

The Chancellor made great play of slashing stamp duty for first-time buyers, a move designed to win back support among the hundreds of thousands of young folk in England who have defected to Corbyn’s Labour Party. Of course, the Treasury is trousering more than £9bn a year from stamp duty (and rising) so this is not the giveaway it seems. Paradoxically, cutting stamp duty will increase demand for property long before we see any expansion in housing supply. Which will actually increase house prices. Welcome to the wacky world of capitalism.

The really big bombshell in yesterday’s Budget was confirmation that the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) had slashed its forecasts for UK economic growth. According to the OBR, GDP growth will be below two per cent till at least 2022, possibly longer. That’s the worst forecast in decades. It is caused partly by Brexit woes but even more so by the UK’s disastrous productivity record. Explanation: UK investors put their money in property, not in innovation or making things.

So what is Hammond pumping extra cash into? There’s £44bn for housing (through a lot of this is “funny money”, not hard cash) plus that stamp duty cut. In other words, Hammond is still championing the interests of UK rentier and financial capitalism, not manufacturing. Anyone who believes all that guff about Britain leading the world in driverless cars should look at what’s going on in America and China.

There are lots of fiddling things in the Budget be welcomed but they don’t add up to a major economic shift of direction. As expected, Hammond has finally removed the anomaly whereby the police and fire services in Scotland get docked £140m a year in VAT payments. SNP MPs have argued for years against this iniquitous charge, which represents a Westminster financial veto on the Scottish Parliament deciding how it wants to organise public services. Phil explained away this U-turn by claiming he was responding to the entreaties of Tory MPs in Scotland. The truth is that he had to throw a bone to the faceless Tory wonders, given the cash he’s had to find to bribe the DUP.

Hammond also confirmed he will allow the tax history of an oil and gas field to be transferred when it is sold, letting buyers (usually smaller firms) claim greater relief when they ultimately decommission these assets. The value of reliefs depends on the amount of tax paid during the life of the field. Under current rules, this tax history can’t be transferred on sale. This has stopped new investors buying assets in the North Sea, as they can’t afford decommissioning bills. Yesterday’s change will help unlock the 20 billion barrels of oil and gas still remaining. But don’t get too excited. The real need is to exploit the new West of Shetland fields, which takes big money. Why not create a public-sector oil and gas company, like the Norwegians, and keep all the profits?

What wasn’t in the Budget? No mention of pensions for the first time I can remember. Phil and the PM fell out over Hammond’s helpful hint that he wanted to scrap the triple-lock promise on pensions that keeps their value safe. Don’t imagine this is off the agenda. If the economy does start to splutter, and borrowing targets are missed, it is the pensioners whose pockets Hammond will pick.

Finally, I see in the Budget small print that Phil hopes to balance his books by flogging off £3bn worth of RBS shares every year for the next five years. Maybe. But as I say every Budget, why not keep RBS in public ownership and use it to invest in manufacturing industry and economic growth, like a proper bank?