The big question this week was whether Gordon Brown (Titanic) Enterprises Ltd would steer away from the rocks. It did not.

This week's Budget leaves the crew sailing on in much the same direction as before. There is no serious plan for controlling public spending, let alone for restructuring a State that is manifestly unaffordable according to the Treasury's own figures. There are taxes on both rich and poor, somewhat at odds with Gordon Brown's emphasis on “fiscal stimulus”. And even more borrowing, at such vertiginous levels that the investors needed to finance our debts may simply jump overboard.

In a crisis of this magnitude, the job of the Budget was to restore confidence. The precise numbers were never going to be correct, since no one can accurately predict the size of the hole Britain is in. We do not know how quickly or reliably the banks will repay their loans. We do not know what will happen to demand in the countries to which we need to export. We do not know how much further the pound may fall, or how much we may end up paying to service our debts. But we do know that the hole is big. At £175 billion, or 12.4 per cent of GDP, Britain's projected budget deficit for this year would be the biggest in the G20.

What is needed is a serious plan for recovery. Instead, we got growth forecasts that were fantasy even by forecast standards, a craven decision actually to increase public spending in the run-up to the election, and various pranks designed to pour cold water on the heads of a Tory administration after that. It was a childish response to a situation that cries out for grown-ups.

Budget 2009: A step-by-step guide

Alistair Darling has revealed the steps he believes will drag Britain out of the worst economic slump since 1946

• Jobless hits 2.1m as public debt soars to £90bn

• Budget reaction: chorus of disappointment

• Alistair Darling's Budget tax hike for the rich sets election battle line

BACKGROUND

• Home sales fears despite stamp duty extension

• Power boost to wind and oil

• Wealthy pension investors hit

• David Cameron bites back at 'fictional' Budget

• Budget 2009: speech in full

Two audiences need convincing that the Government is realistic about the challenge it faces: consumers and the City. In this, their interests are surprisingly well aligned. In the City, the talk yesterday was of “investor indigestion”. The Government surprised the markets by announcing that it plans to sell £220 billion of bonds, or gilts, to help to finance its gargantuan debt. That is twice as many as it sold last year, and more than any analyst had expected. The market will buy all of these bonds only if it is convinced that there is a credible “road map” back to stability. Investors are rightly asking whether a Government that blithely racked up £600 billion of public debt in the boom years is capable of prudence in the bust. A month ago, the markets were so jittery that an auction of 40-year bonds failed to find enough buyers.

Even if investors stay loyal, GB (Titanic) Enterprises is so far in the red that its interest payments will be immense. By next year the Treasury expects debt interest payments to equal spending on education and defence combined. That is a real burden on the consumers who the Treasury glibly assumes will resume their boom levels of spending.

But will they, knowing that the UK is mortgaged up to the hilt? Why should they believe growth forecasts that are so out of line with international expectations, from a Government that has made expedient overoptimism its speciality? Seeing the Government's reluctance to reform the State or tackle the vast unfunded public sector pension liabilities, will they suspect that their taxes may rise beyond the planned increases in national insurance and fuel duty? Might they save more and spend less, as a result? The decision, solely to wrongfoot the Tories, to bring forward taxes on the rich, from 2011 to 2010 could also depress spending and the housing market precisely as the Treasury is predicting recovery.

Watching Alistair Darling's interminable monologue on Wednesday, with its rhetoric about saving a generation from the scrapheap (if he wants to create jobs he should reverse the 5 per cent rise in business rate, not bung scrappage fees to foreign car plants), I found myself wishing that he would just tell us the simple truth. There are moments in history when we are prepared to hear bad news. When, contrary to what many politicians think, we would rather be told the facts than fed soundbites.

I wanted the Chancellor to tell us how much of our prosperity in the past decade was an illusion. I wanted him to explain how he could predict efficiency savings that Labour used to insist were impossible. I wanted him to admit that monopoly public services are unsustainable and start an intelligent debate about their reform. I wanted him to give us a basic economics lesson about how governments get out of recessions as bad as this one. There aren't many options: raise taxes; spend less; borrow more; print money; go to the IMF. But we deserve to know what he is betting on each one and why.

A Chancellor who had the courage and humility to explain his reasoning might have taken the people with him. But this Government cannot give up its use of Budgets for cheap tactical positioning. The person who gave us the economics lesson was Robert Chote, the lucid and independent head of the Institute for Fiscal Studies. He told us that half of the £90 billion of “fiscal tightening” in the Budget is unaccounted for, raising the spectre of more tax rises. I'd much rather have Mr Chote for Chancellor than ministers who take the public for fools.

The people who are keeping GB (Titanic) Enterprises afloat are the people who have worked hard, saved conscientiously and avoided debt. They are the people whose savings Mr Brown attacked in 1997 when he abolished the dividend tax credit for pension funds. They are the people whose businesses he has stifled with excessive rules. They are the people he betrayed by creating a regulatory system that allowed British banks to take on even more debt than those in America. He has now betrayed them again, by designing a Budget lifeboat that puts the Government's interests ahead of the public's and does not even begin to address the radical changes that are needed in public policy and the welfare state.

We need an election. Otherwise, with a captain who cannot inspire confidence, we are all sunk.

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