of payments, which had been in a deficit for the previous five years. Therefore, Jenkins pursued deflation, including cuts in public expenditure and increases in taxation, in order to ensure that resources went into exports rather than domestic consumption. Jenkins warned the House of Commons in January 1968 that there was "two years of hard slog ahead". He quickly gained a reputation as a particularly tough Chancellor with his 1968 budget increasing taxes by £923 million, more than twice the increase of any previous budget to date. Jenkins had warned the Cabinet that a second devaluation would occur in three months if his budget did not restore confidence in sterling. He restored prescription charges (which had been abolished when Labour returned to office in 1964) and postponed the raising of the school leaving age to 16 to 1973 instead of 1971. Housing and road building plans were also heavily cut, and he also accelerated Britain's withdrawal East of Suez. Jenkins ruled out increasing the income tax and so raised the taxes on: drinks and cigarettes (except on beer), purchase tax, petrol duty, road tax, a 50 per cent rise in Selective Employment Tax and a one-off Special Charge on personal incomes. He also paid for an increase in family allowances by cutting child tax allowances. Despite Edward Heath claiming it was a "hard, cold budget, without any glimmer of warmth" Jenkins' first budget broadly received a warm reception, with Harold Wilson remarking that "it was widely acclaimed as a speech of surpassing quality and elegance" and Barbara Castle that it "took everyone's breath away". Richard Crossman said it was "genuinely based on socialist principles, fair in the fullest sense by really helping people at the bottom of the scale and by really taxing the wealthy". In his budget broadcast on 19 March, Jenkins said that Britain had been living in a "fool's paradise" for years and that it was "importing too much, exporting too little and paying ourselves too much", with a lower standard of living than France or West Germany. Jenkins' supporters in the Parliamentary Labour Party became known as the "Jenkinsites". These were usually younger, middle-class and university-educated ex-Gaitskellites such as Bill Rodgers, David Owen, Roy Hattersley, Dick Taverne, John Mackintosh and David Marquand. In May–July 1968 some of his supporters, led by Patrick Gordon Walker and Christopher Mayhew, plotted to replace Wilson with Jenkins as Labour leader