The "Carrier Bag Budget"

John Rentoul, in The Independent had a good quote:

"One Tory MP – Jacqui Lait, since you ask – called it 'the Carrier Bag Budget.' Which was a good description. It was a flimsy, disposable but long-lastingly irritating political event. It was an unrecyclable chain of missed opportunities."

John Sauven, executive director of Greenpeace:

"Suspending the promised increase in fuel duty has fatally undermined his boast that this is a green budget, and tinkering with taxes on planes and cars isn't going to stop new runways and roads being built ... The Chancellor should have channelled cash into clean technologies, energy efficiency projects and support for the renewables industry. On all these counts, his measures have failed to match the scale of the challenge."

Andrew Simms, policy director, new economics foundation:

"To get a feel for the scale of the transition required, Darling should be thinking in terms of an environmental war budget."

"It would be better to force fossil fuel companies like BP and Shell to introduce a new category for their reserves of ‘unburnable.’ The new category would reveal what should be left in the ground to prevent dangerous climate change."

"The UK could learn from Norway’s experience, and set up an Oil Legacy Fund, paid for primarily by a Windfall Tax on oil and gas company profits. Darling could then re-commit to the fuel duty escalator which would help progressively change behaviour, whilst having the resources to invest in a range of measures: expanding the use of school buses to tackle both congestion and energy-inefficient private-vehicle use on the school run, lowering the age for free public transport, and allowing adults with children to go free on public transport, to help for local authorities with the complexities of managing new, decentralised renewable energy services and technologies, and the rapid roll-out of micro, small and medium-scale renewable energy technologies that would create countless thousands of ‘green collar’ jobs."