DEMOCRACY thrives with a healthy opposition to ask awkward questions about what the Government is doing, to challenge it to justify its decisions, and to campaign against unjust, or undemocratic policies.

In our country, we pride ourselves on our commitment to liberal democracy and we take opposition so seriously that we expect taxpayers to make a contribution towards funding it.

The Leader of the Opposition gets a ministerial salary and a chauffeur driven car.

The opposition chief whip and his deputy also receive ministerial salaries. The opposition party is also funded to the tune of more than £1m a year in order to ensure it has sufficient resources to research issues, and to match the support that the governing parties get from civil servants.

Given all this investment by taxpayers, I think that sometimes we are entitled to ask if we are getting value for our money. I am prompted to raise the question by what, in my opinion, was a very poor response indeed last week by the leader of the opposition to the Chancellor’s Budget statement.

To be fair, it is the most difficult speech that any leader of the opposition ever has to deliver: he has little time to think about it; the Chancellor, who has had weeks to prepare, will have wound his supporters up into a cheering frenzy; and the leader of the opposition has to get up and try and lift the morale of his own supporters off the floor. Difficult though it is, you ought to at least make the effort.

The opposition leader gets a copy of the budget statement about an hour before it is delivered, with any market sensitive numbers blanked out.

It isn’t a lot of notice given that you have to go into the Commons chamber for Prime Minister’s question time half an hour before the budget is delivered.

However, with a sensible division of labour between yourself, your advisers, your Shadow Chancellor and his support team, you ought to be able to give a reasonable response to the budget immediately after it is announced.

At the very least, you ought to be able to respond by saying which bits of the Budget you will support and which you will oppose. When I was in opposition we used to fill the shadow cabinet room with accountants and economists, all wired up to their computers and a live TV feed from the Commons, so they could crunch the numbers as Gordon Brown announced them.

As they did so, messengers were sent running to the chamber and notes were passed along the bench, via the scrutiny of George Osborne and Oliver Letwin, and on to David Cameron so he was armed with the implications of what Gordon Brown was announcing ‘in real time’ (as the computer whizzes call it).

Last week none of this occurred, no notes were passed, the Shadow Chancellor, Ed Balls, whispered nothing to Ed Milliband who, when he rose to respond, didn’t refer to a single measure that had been announced. Instead, he went into a knockabout rant about the Bullingdon Club and Eton mess. If you can’t perform effectively as an opposition, will people trust you to be the Government?