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Enforcer or villain? Perhaps the new Chancellor, George Osborne, should try out the Next Big Thing from Dundee's computer games industry.

APB, or All Points Bulletin, is an online interactive role-playing game that's been created on Tayside by Realtime Worlds. In the wake of Grand Theft Auto and Crackdown, the latest shoot-'em-up dystopia is soon to be launched on a global market that rivals Hollywood for its enormous commercial clout.

The new Chancellor could be the tough guy enforcer of a tough new spending regime, bringing order where financial meltdown threatened, though some see him as the villain whose tax raid and spending squeeze isn't as fair as he's claiming.

But he's decided to scrap the tax breaks promised by his Labour predecessor for the computer games industry. Outside Dundee and Salford, the two big British centres for the industry, it may be that no-one much cares if the jobs go overseas - to Canada for instance, where the industry is being offered significant tax breaks.

Free market

But the significance may go beyond one young industry. It appears to symbolise a change in philosophy running through today's Budget - a belief that government should not be picking winners or backing particular sectors.

It returns to a more Conservative and free market approach to the use of tax incentives. You could see it also in the announcement by Chief Secretary Danny Alexander that his predecessors' one-off supports for industry, such as Sheffield Forgemasters, are being axed. Indeed, the Yorkshire example goes further, suggesting a reluctance to prop up those in trouble.

Only two sectors got special treatment from George Osborne's first budget. Cider-makers saw a proposed duty increase taken away, though a review of alcohol duty more widely is under way. The Scotch whisky industry hopes that will highlight what it says has been a historically unfair bias against spirits.

The other sector is banks, facing a penalising levy for being the baddest of the villainous baddies - even though that makes it more difficult for them to lend and to generate the profits and shareholder value that we, as shareholders in RBS and Lloyds, want to see from them.

North of Watford

But once you look beyond the tax increases and spending cuts, the evidence of a growth strategy represents a giant gamble that private businesses will take up the economic and employment slack. They've been given the tools in tax incentives - now it's down to them to prove the free market credo works.

It has to do so while Britain's government sector is contracting, its household sector has switched from consumption to saving, and key European export markets are going through the same process, sucking demand out the economy.

One other new departure for the new government's growth stimulation efforts is in what used to be called regional policy. The idea is that newly-created businesses will get a payroll tax holiday for the first ten employees it hires, and significantly, it is only available to companies outside London and the English south-east.

There's an acknowledgement that the south-east is already much more successful at new business and job creation. So this makes the whole of the rest of the country into a giant enterprise zone.

It suggests that the new government may not be in the business of picking sectoral winners, but it is more willing than its Labour predecessor to pick areas of Britain that could do with more stimulation than others. That may help inform its approach to the new tax powers that the Scottish parliament is to get.

The bits north of Watford and west of Slough also happen to be the parts of the country that have been most dependent on the public sector for jobs, and which now face a disproportionate hit from the government spending squeeze that's now under way.