THE director of the Adam Smith Institute, Eamonn Butler, had it about right when he said that if he had an hour left on Earth he would like to spend it listening to one of Gordon Brown’s speeches. Not because this would be either enjoyable or illuminating, he added mischievously, but because it would make his last hour on Earth seem so much longer. Mr Brown is rather proud of his links with Adam Smith, the great economist and fellow Kirkcaldy-born Scot. But Smith, were he alive today, would be appalled by the economics of this tax-and-spend chancellor.

A kind interpretation of the chancellor’s pre-budget report would be that he is keeping his powder dry for a whirlwind first 100 days as prime minister. The word from the Treasury beforehand, however, was that this would be Mr Brown doing the “vision thing”; setting out his aims and ambitions for Britain not just for the next 12 months but for the next 10 years.

If this was the chancellor’s vision, then it was blindingly myopic. Instead of insight we had a string of reheated announcements, particularly on school spending. The Institute for Fiscal Studies, in a devastating critique, pointed out that the new money for schools last week amounted to £20 per pupil, a far cry from the tens of billions of pounds liberally scattered throughout the chancellor’s speech.

More disturbingly, even though he did not hand out much new cash, Mr Brown appears wedded to a statist solution to Britain’s educational shortcomings. Tony Blair, belatedly, has realised that parental choice and school autonomy are the routes to improving education. Mr Brown, whose instincts are command and control, is stuck at first base. He seems to believe that if only state schools had as much money as their independent counterparts the gap in performance would disappear. Such naivety is alarming.

Mr Brown’s champions tell us that he will bring a new spirit of honesty and openness to 10 Downing Street. We have had a decade of a “pretty straight kind of guy” who turned out to be anything but. Now, they say, we will get the real McCoy. That, however, is impossible to square with the man we saw at the dispatch box last week. If that was a straight politician, what does a dishonest one look like? From the start, the chancellor has used statistics like a deranged bookie. His first spending review, as long ago as 1998, used triple-counting to make it appear he was pumping more money into the National Health Service than he was. He has changed the economic cycle at will to ensure he meets his own golden rule even though, in doing so, he has made that rule a laughing stock.

More seriously, he is a serial taxer, not content unless he is getting his mitts on more of our cash. The green debate has come a long way in 12 months, partly thanks to David Cameron. Some people would be ready to pay more in green taxes in return for tax cuts elsewhere. What they are not prepared to accept is a tax hike dressed up as an environmental move. Doubling air passenger duty to bring in an extra £1 billion, even hitting people who have already bought and paid for their tickets, was classic Brown. There was nothing long-term about it. If anything, it has harmed the case for green taxes.

Mr Brown has a visceral hatred when people legitimately try to save money by planning their tax affairs. In the case of the thousands who were taking advantage of his new rules to pass on their pensions to their children, Mr Brown’s big clunking fist came down to stop them. Previous chancellors have always operated on the basis that taxing people retrospectively was wrong. This one relishes it. So we have had a good look at the next prime minister. He spins and he twists. He gives us, if not dodgy dossiers, then flaky figures. He appears to suck up to business and ordinary families while making life harder for them. If this is a vision for Britain’s future, its inspiration is Dickens’ Artful Dodger, not Blake’s Jerusalem.