Look, we know our place, we semi-numerate arts graduate girlies. We don't normally intervene in abstruse economic debates, sticking modestly to matters of ethics, aesthetics, priorities and psychologies. But since it has recently transpired that the world's ruling economists, bankers, treasuries and strategy wonks are not after all infallible, it is perhaps permissible for a lay thinker to stick an oar in.

The VAT reduction is the final provocation. It is a stupid tax anyway, visibly inferior to the simple old purchase tax. I am compelled by law to charge VAT on my freelance services; my various employers pay it, I solemnly give it to HMRC, once a quarter, having attempted to read the last 15 expensively printed editions of VAT Notes about non-perishable whale products and EU-exempt tricycle handlebar accessories. Whereon the employers promptly claim it back as a business expense.

It is thus circular in far too many areas: I am an unpaid and irritable tax collector, yet of very little help to the Exchequer. It is like being a stripper in an empty room: a terrible waste of sequins and effort.

But the absurd and temporary 2.5 per cent reduction puts the tin lid on it. It is the silliest gesture since Harold Wilson banged double VAT on yacht equipment to annoy Ted Heath. It will cost the Government - which is to say, us - billions without reducing paperwork or public salaries by a bean. Nor will it “stimulate consumers”. With respect to yesterday's Letters page correspondent who reckoned the VAT gimmick saves every UK citizen 200 quid a year, how many shoppers will be excited by a reduction of 2.1p in the price-tag pound?

Besides, thousands of small retailers won't pass it on, given the expensive logistical nightmare of reprinting or adjusting tags and lists and invoice forms and DayGlo placards, not to mention trying to knock 1.05p off a 50p toy or tackle the recurring decimal 9s involved in de-vatting a 5.99 price tag. Especially in December, with an influx of baffled temp student shop assistants prodding helplessly at till buttons and calling plaintively for supervisors.

My shopping spouse reports that one electrical retailer started early with a system of completing the transaction and then suddenly demanding the credit card all over again as he tried to leave, to re-credit 41p while queues built up behind him.

OK, perhaps something had to be done to make us feel richer. But it could have been a simpler something: raise the income tax threshold a smidgin by pushing a couple of buttons in Newcastle, freeze NI, whatever. But no. It had to be fiddly, timid, confusing and ineffective. Bravo!

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