This Budget was well worth waiting for. It dramatised the complete incompatibility between Rachel Reeves and Rishi Sunak.
Reeves has the speaking style of a Soviet commissar: clunky, self-righteous, power-obsessed, full of invincible certitudes about the new Five Year Plan.
“My belief in Britain burns brighter than ever,” she declared, which being translated means: “Comrades, we are the masters now and we shall sweep into the dustbin of history the hated remnants of Sunakism.”
How shocked she was to discover the £22 billion black hole supposedly left by Sunak and Jeremy Hunt, who with “the height of irresponsibility” had hidden the reality of the public spending situation from the people.
There will now be “an end to short-termism”. She will appoint a new “Covid Corruption Commissioner” and set up “the new Office for Value for Money”.
Soviet-style slogan followed Soviet-style slogan and was applauded by the workers and peasants on the Labour benches, of whom the most zealous have formed themselves into Young Pioneer units.
As the light faded on Wednesday afternoon they were to be found painting the slogans of the new regime on every bridge between Westminster and Dorneywood under which Comrade Reeves can be expected to pass in her Zil limousine on her way to rest from her titanic labours at her modest country dacha.
Capitalist lackeys have in recent weeks tried to mock Comrades Reeves and Starmer for being unable to define the “working people” whose taxes they promised not to raise.
But during this Budget statement, it became clear that “working people” is a deliberately vague term, which makes it harder to convict Comrade Reeves of lying.
As she revealed her tax plans, she was heard in silent trepidation. This is not a Budget for kulaks, the richer peasants with larger farms who together employ millions of people. From them and their like another £25 billion will be taken in National Insurance contributions. Can it be they will economise by employing fewer people?
Private jets and flights to California will be taxed more highly too, but Comrade Reeves will take a penny off a pint in the pub.
At this news wild cheering broke out from the dimmer of the workers and peasants. How they love a touch of class war, and how cheaply they allow themselves to be bought off.
VAT on private school fees followed soon afterwards: another sop to the workers and peasants.
“The Government chooses to defend working people every single time,” Reeves said in her hard, metallic voice.
We dropped off for a moment – one wonders whether some bright spark has thought of marketing this speech as an insomnia cure – but when we awoke she was saying: “We will extend the Innovation Acceleration Programme.”
It’s all systems go in the brave new planned economy! Comrade Reeves will “drive growth”, set up rail services from Oxford to Cambridge which get as far as Bracknell, start “tunnelling work to London Euston Station”, back carbon capture technology which may or may not work, and establish GB Energy “at its new home in Aberdeen”.
In a rare personal touch, Comrade Reeves revealed that “my school was a couple of prefab huts in a playground”, thereby establishing that she is one of the workers and peasants, while at the same time attacking the Conservatives, under whom “progress has gone backwards”.
Progress under Comrade Reeves will once more go forwards. She ended her speech rather abruptly, and was met with a storm of cheers from the workers and peasants, which ended even more abruptly, as if an unseen conductor had suddenly told them to stop.
Sunak rose to reply. This was his swansong as Conservative Leader, and he was magnificent.
Never has he been so angry. He declared that Comrades Reeves and Starmer “have not been straight with the British people” and “the fiscal rules have been fiddled”.
To Sunak, who believes in sound money and did his best to attain it, these are mortal sins. “She has totally failed to grip public spending,” he went on. “She doesn’t seem to think the Civil Service can be reduced by a single person.”
“This is what happens when the Labour Party is run by people with no experience of business,” he added. “You name it, they’ll tax it.”
So there it is, a Budget for bureaucrats, a state run by apparatchiks who think they can draw up a plan for growth and it will happen. At the end of this Parliament we shall see whether it has.
