David Maddox: Making a meal out of tax cuts

It's nice to know that Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling want to line our pockets with money - coppers that is.
Just had my usual breakfast - a plastic cup full of fruit salad - from Holyrood's canteen and found that the usual cost of £1.20 has been reduced to £1.17. This, of course, is the result of the reduction in VAT from 17.5 per cent to 15 per cent announced by Mr Darling last week. Apparently my £3 lunch will be knocked down by the princely sum of 6p.
I can't help but feel that Messrs Darling and Brown are taking the old adage "watch the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves" a little far.
Apart from adding a little weight to my pocket with jingling copper coins, you have to wonder whether such paltry sums will have much affect at all, especially when shops are already knocking down prices by up to 50 per cent.
The one affect the VAT cut has had -as witnessed by one or two sweaty brows in Holyrood's canteen - is to stress out the poor people who have to reconfigure their tills and reprice their products to keep up with this temporary change.