By Bagehot
A BET on growth, concluded British newspapers this morning, as they reviewed the annual budget delivered by George Osborne, the chancellor of the exchequer. That is a fair enough assessment, not least because very few budgets are intended as a bet on recession. A fiscally neutral package of tweaks to the tax code and changes to pension rules, the big headline news was in a sense the absence of headline news: Mr Osborne is sticking to the deficit-reduction plan he set out nine months ago in his first, emergency budget. „Britain has a plan and we are sticking to it,“ Mr Osborne said.