HERE, a few hours earlier than usual, is my print column on the budget:

AS FANS of period drama can attest, there was a time when the British elite regarded salaried work of any sort, let alone the drudgery of a Monday to Friday commute, as a badge of social shame. Thus a snobbish dowager in “Downton Abbey”, acidly inquiring: “What is a weekend?”

Responding on March 21st to the government's annual budget statement, Ed Miliband, the leader of the Labour opposition, tried a similarly class-based put-down. Mr Miliband expressed outrage at an announcement that the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition would be trimming the highest rate of income tax from 50% to 45%. He scorned a claim by George Osborne, the Conservative chancellor of the exchequer, that this year's budget “rewards work”.

This is a budget for millionaires not working families, cried Mr Miliband, urging ministers on the front bench opposite to raise their hands if they would benefit from the tax cut (cue fixed expressions and some squirming). The Labour leader ventured a joke, charging that the “born-to-rule” swells filling David Cameron's cabinet think that “Downton Abbey” is a fly-on-the-wall documentary, rather than a costume drama.

Expect more of this. Mr Osborne, who is the Tories' chief political strategist when he is not running the Treasury—and sometimes even when he is—knows the presentational dangers of giving a tax break to the top 1% of earners at a time of public spending cuts, rising prices and general economic gloom. Nor does he need reminding that his back-story makes him vulnerable to gibes about toffs: he is heir to a baronetcy dating back to 1629, as well as to a hefty family fortune.

Yet in his attempt to caricature the political message underlying the 2012 budget, Labour's Mr Miliband chose the wrong screen hit. This was not a “Downton Abbey” budget. That lavish drama depicts a caste of privileged insiders vainly trying to keep the winds of change at bay. Labour and even some within the coalition called on Mr Osborne to do something rather similar, in the form of a new British industrial policy to subsidise domestic manufacturing. But a few tinkering tax breaks aside (one of them, in a nice irony, for makers of high-end television dramas), Mr Osborne declined to heed those calls. Instead he used the limited funds available to him to lower tax rates on corporate profits: a pitch for footloose multinational investors to choose Britain.

Nor was it a budget steeped in social conservatism. Risking the wrath of tradition-minded Tory MPs and voters, Mr Osborne ignored colleagues' demands that he should use the tax system to nudge Britons to get married. In a dowager-defying manoeuvre, he hit lots of pensioners with what amounts to a tax hike. In a challenge to the Daily Mail, tabloid tribune of Middle England, the chancellor softened but did not cancel plans to remove child benefit payments from households with at least one high earner—a spending cut the Mail denounced on the budget's eve as an un-Tory attack on stay-at-home mothers.

The rich are different, which is why Britain needs them

Instead Mr Osborne used the budget to signal how Britain can adapt and thrive in an age of globalisation, and “earn its way in the world”. Though he spoke of Britain, it is striking how many of his decisions will affect a few concentrated pockets of affluence. Only about 275,000 people pay the 50% rate—though they are estimated to pay more than a quarter of all income taxes between them. More than half live in London or the south-east of England.

Mr Osborne's budget also sent some very un-Downton messages about the relative merits of earned income over unearned wealth. His Lib Dem coalition partners deserve some of the credit for this. Lib Dem leaders only agreed to trim the top income tax rate as part of a broader effort to rebalance the tax burden from low to high earners, and from earned to accumulated riches. The Lib Dems' preferred wheeze, a “mansion tax” on expensive houses, was rejected by Mr Cameron who feared tales of widows on modest pensions being forced to sell family homes bought for a song decades earlier. The Lib Dems were won round with accelerated tax cuts for the lowest paid, and increases in the stamp duty payable when buying homes worth £2m ($3.2m) or more. Positively punitive rates will apply when such homes are bought via a tax dodge favoured by itinerant rock stars and oligarchs. Here too the effects will be localised: four-fifths of such houses are in London. But stamp duty will not oblige widows to move.

Add it all up, and another screen hit comes to mind. Consider the elements: a British bid to woo hard-working international talent. A picturesque, foreigner-friendly setting of high-priced London houses, in neighbourhoods where incoming plutocrats rub shoulders with 40-year residents. Though Mr Osborne is no Hugh Grant, this was a “Notting Hill” budget.

That still carries political risks. Mr Osborne, as it happens, is a real-life resident of Notting Hill, a neighbourhood beyond the reach of most Britons. Indeed he grew up nearby, in an entrepreneurial London household (his father made his fortune, founding a successful wallpaper business on his kitchen table).

Despite the risks, the chancellor's insistence on the merits of hard work deserves to pay dividends. It was certainly overdue, after months of sweeping anti-business rhetoric from politicians. True, Mr Osborne took a fresh swipe at banks on budget day. But he also reminded the House of Commons that most wealthy people pay their taxes, and that without them Britain “could not begin to afford” the public services on which voters depend.

This was, in short, a budget aimed at persuading entrepreneurial strivers to move to and stay in Britain, many of them doubtless foreigners. Downton's imperious dowager would be appalled. That by itself is a recommendation.