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FOriginally, Budget It was quite good. At least Rachel Reeves made the numbers add upThe reaction from the gilt market suggests the government’s creditors believe the Chancellor has a credible plan to stop the debt spiraling out of control,
Doubling the margin for error, known as headroom, from £10 billion a year to £20 billion was a prudent decision, and the right one. The Chancellor took a useless risk last year,
But in many other respects, the budget was disappointing, and keir starmer He should take joint responsibility for this with his neighbor at number 11. A well-informed decision on the budget is often different when journalists, accountants and think tanks have time to analyze the data in depth. In the case of Ms Reeves’s second budget, it seems The initial negative judgment has only hardened,
Most of all, it represents the wrong priorities for the country. Once analysts removed the distractions of the premature publication of the Office for Budget Responsibility report, it became clear that nothing had changed from the former in the OBR forecast.Budget speculations were accepted,
In total, the Chancellor needed to find £6 billion a year to compensate for the lower-than-expected growth forecast, plus £10 billion for additional headroom. But instead of stopping the growth of public spending, it got all that money from higher taxes, and not only that but it increased taxes by an extra £10 billion a year to pay for higher welfare spending.
As we said on Budget day, these are necessity-driven priorities Weak Prime Minister and Chancellor to appease the sentiments of Labor MPsInstead of taking decisions in the national interest. Instead of focusing on swing voters in the country, Ms Reeves and Sir Keir were only interested in swing voters in the parliamentary Labor Party – the MPs who could make or break the pair’s hold on high office.
We understand the serious concern of those MPs about child poverty. But we have to ask whether simply removing the two-child limit altogether is the best use of scarce resources, or whether a partial removal of it combined with more Sure Start centers as suggested by former Home Secretary David Blunkett would have been more effective – and more likely to retain the message of responsible parenting.
We also understand that Labor MPs have concerns about the unsuccessful attempt this summer by former Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall to impose a ban. Increase in Disability Benefit ExpendituresThis was a crude measure that would have taken payments away from existing claimants, But in principle it was right that the increase in spending should be reduced, because it did not reflect the real increase in health conditions and risked taking benefits away from people,
Other priorities revealed by the Budget are also contrary to the national interest, and indeed the opposite of what many people thought they were voting for last year. There was nothing in the Chancellor’s statement that would encourage growth enough to score the OBR.
And the treatment of young people – the future of the country – is disgraceful. There are plans to slash school funding per pupil, while the latent pressure on student loan repayments is an outrage – as the repayment threshold is expected to fall closer to the minimum wage. This is a Labor government that is giving 16-year-olds the vote while actually telling them to vote for some other party.
On the second day of her post-Budget interview round, Ms Reeves took great pains to claim she had not broken Labour’s manifesto promise not to raise taxes on working people, and especially not to raise income tax. He tried to make a pithy defense by pointing out that the manifesto mentions income tax “rates” which remain unchanged even as inflation pulls more and more income into the tax net. But people are less willing to give him the benefit of the doubt because he tried a similar trick in last year’s Budget, claiming that the increase in employers’ national insurance was not a tax on “working people”.
Thus he and Sir Keir have further undermined people’s confidence in those they elect to represent their interests – and to priorities driven by their own political survival rather than the national interest, and particularly the well-being of young people. A considered decision on this week’s budget has been negated.