This Budget proved the Coalition parties are good for each other The worst you can accurately say about the freezing of age-related allowances is that the Chancellor of the Exchequer was not frank. He called it a "simplification," as if it were his kindly way of sparing all those muddled grey heads some nasty paperwork. This was irritating and slippery. Mr Osborne would have done much better to link it more clearly to the really substantial change in personal allowances. It is part of a much larger picture, and wholly, in that picture, justifiable. As far as income taxpayers are concerned, two big things happened in this Budget. One was that poor working people got better treated and the other was that rich working people did too. We keep being told - I may have written it myself - that Mr Osborne is a very political Chancellor. But if politics is still a party-based, zero-sum game, the pure politics of this Budget is a Liberal Democrat victory. As they never tired of leaking, the Liberals insisted on better tax treatment of the working poor and punitive treatment (tycoon taxes, mansion taxes) of the rich. The Conservatives, as the Liberals were also happy to leak, were desperate to cut the top rate of income tax. The compromise was, in essence, that the Tories let the Liberals help the poor, so long as they were allowed to help the rich. If I had to explain this on the doorstep at the next election, I know which party I would rather be representing. The Tories point out that their higher taxes or lower caps on things that rich people do - selling big houses, claiming various reliefs - will more than compensate the Exchequer for the cut of the 50 per cent income tax rate to 45 per cent. In numbers, this will almost certainly prove true, but I did notice an interesting reply that Mr Osborne gave when challenged on the Today programme about his own income. "My salary is less than the £150,000 threshold," he said. I am not a big winner from this Budget. From which one must deduce that he does inwardly believe that the big winners from this Budget are, indeed, those who earn more than £150,000. So it is a Budget for the rich, after all. I know that some Conservative MPs, though robust about supporting Mr Osborne over the storm in the pensioners" teacups, are worried about the cut in the top rate. They note that the effect of the Coalition has been to transform the Budget process from a conjuring trick by an all-powerful Chancellor into a public haggle between the Coalition partners. They believe that the Liberal Democrats, as they haggled, kept a better lookout for public opinion than their own leaders. They are probably correct, but let me make a revolutionary suggestion. Might it not be possible that each Coalition party is right? Surely the Liberal Democrats are justified in insisting on the case of the low-paid. Surely the Tories are vindicated in their tender attention to those earning comfortably into six figures. The reason, in each case, is the same. The issue, so important for economic and social health, is how to make work pay. For years, governments have struggled with the fact that those moving from benefits to work gain only slightly more in wages than they lose in handouts. The poorest workers pay the highest marginal rate of tax. At the other end of the scale, Gordon Brown put up the top rate by 10p, or - to express it in a way which drives the magnitude home - 25 per cent over its previous level. By doing so, he made work much less worthwhile and drove taxpayers to look for the well-off equivalent of welfare benefits - evasion, avoidance, relocating to more friendly nations. By abandoning the 20-year era of the 40 per cent top rate, Mr Brown sent out a warning to the world about Britain, its attitudes and its future. Whatever the public may be feeling just now, Mr Osborne is brave and right to try to drag us kicking and screaming back into the late 20th century. He would have been even braver and righter to have cut back to the original 40 per cent. It is strange that the Coalition cannot sing its own praises when it achieves such a deal. However scratchily arrived at, it is surely a good example of what it is all for. As well as getting both partners the things that they want, it broadens the thinking of each. Tories now focus more than in the past on the vulnerable; Liberals now have to contemplate the fact that high taxes on the rich don't work. Given how frightful our overall economic and financial situation remains, this uniquely widespread level of common sense about tax is encouraging. But it leaves, you may have noticed, one major group of victims - not the retired, but the ever-growing, soon-to-be five million strong band of people who pay 40 per cent income tax at the newly reduced threshold of just over £41,000. They found no voice in the counsels of the Coalition. Their plight is a perfect illustration of why, unless cuts can really be made and growth can really be found, no Budget just now can take us much further forward.