Dizzy suggested two weeks ago that the Tories should harness the distributed brain power of the web and crowd source their response to the budget. Yesterday Eric Pickles announced that is exactly what they are going to do today:

Wading through all this small print ourselves is a huge job. This year we’ve decided to do something a bit different – we’re going to crowdsource our response to the Budget. Once the Budget’s out, we’ll publish it in a simple format as soon as possible so you can have a good dig into it. The Treasury has hundreds of civil servants working on all this and there’s no way we can match their resources – so it’s important for as many of you as possible to lend a hand in analysing the detail.

CCHQ clearly follow blogs closely. The see-through government idea – publishing the details of all government contracts – was another idea first promoted by a blogger and taken up as Conservative policy.  Unfortunately it seems Tory taxation policy is controlled by this blogger instead of these ones…