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A chorus of disappointment greeted Alistair Darling's recession Budget today as the Chancellor's efforts to offer a little to everyone failed to find approval.

Business leaders complained that the Chancellor had not done enough to help them to retain staff, meet overheads and grow their business, campaigners warned that too little had been done to shield the poor, while taxpayers quailed at the mountain of public debt.

The unions found something to applaud, praising the Chancellor's action on jobs and taxing the rich, but even they dismissed the Budget as lacklustre.

In perhaps the most excoriating response, made the moment the Chancellor sat down, David Cameron said that his speech had revealed the “utter mess” that Labour and Gordon Brown had made of the economy.

“The fastest rise in unemployment in our history, the worst recession since World War Two, and the worst peacetime public finances ever known," said the Conservative leader, to huge cheers from the Tory benches.

“As of today, any claim they have ever made to economic incompetence is dead, over, finished.”

Mr Cameron said the £348 billion that Chancellor Alistair Darling planned to borrow over the next two years was more than had been borrowed by every government put together since the Bank of England was first founded more than 300 years ago.

“This Prime Minister has certainly got himself in the history books - he has written a whole chapter in red ink - Labour’s decade of debt.”

Later, Richard Lambert, the director-general of the employers' organisation the CBI, was more measured but still damning.

“The key question for this Budget was whether it set out a credible and rigorous path for restoring the public finances to health. The CBI’s preliminary judgment must be that it does not," he said.

“The Chancellor’s economic forecasts for next year and beyond look optimistic. By pushing out the horizon for balancing the books as far as 2018 the Government is running too much of a risk."

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