Parliamentary reporter James Slack sees Gordon Brown kick off a 12-month long

General Election campaign.

GORDON Brown gave pensioners a long overdue break, as he fired the starting gun for a year-long General Election campaign.

By promising an extra £100 to anyone over 70 yesterday, he effectively gave back the money they are about to have taken away through another year of council tax hikes.

Schools, which will pick up at least an extra £55,000 each, did okay - and even drinkers (1p on beer and 4p on wine) and smokers (8p on a packet of fags) escaped without their pips being squeaked too badly.

But the Chancellor's eighth budget provided only bad news for the army of public servants.

He announced more than 40,000 are to face the axe - 30,000 from the Department for Work and Pensioners - with surprising glee.

After seven years of creating Government jobs, he had finally come full circle.

Forcing them on the dole was to be avoided. "Natural wastage" and voluntary redundancy would be the preferred option, he said.

But the important thing was to save a whopping £20 billion to pump back into his Government's priorities.

This was what it was all about - making his savings and reallocating the loot before the Tories could get their hands on it.

If he cuts away the waste and pledges the funds elsewhere, what can his opponent Oliver Letwin promise in the run up to next year's poll?

The prospect of further cuts would have Labour crying that teachers and nurses faced the sack.

He, on the other hand, was able to resist cuts to the budget of the Home Office, Transport, Office of the Deputy Prime Minister - even Defence.

It was a shrewd, if highly predictable, move, which set him up nicely for 12 months of blatant electioneering.

Updated: 12:09 Thursday, March 18, 2004