That was a) the noisiest Budget since Gordon Brown’s in 2002 b) the most ridiculous backbench reception with 32 separate passages of Shame! Shame! Shame! and c) the most egotistical Chancellor’s address ever made. She made 92 references to I and my, with a bonus passage glorifying the first female chancellor. Glorifying is too weak a word. She canonised herself as an example to girls and young women everywhere.
The Tories’ second female PM watched from the Speaker’s Gallery, looking down on the Blue front bench where sat the leader-to-be, their fourth female leader with double diversity points. They are uncatchable by Labour – so inclusive they don’t mention how inclusive they are. Useless, admittedly, but inclusive.
Labour, notoriously, has a problem with women, and Rachel Reeves may yet turn out to be the most problematic. Au fond, she has the weakness – most commonly seen in young women – of taking astrology seriously. Charming in little girls, less so in Chancellors of the Exchequer.
Time and again, she made vast, unprovable assertions. The VAT on school fees will produce not £8.5 billion but £9 billion over the forecast period. The non-dom tax will raise £12.7 billion, the welfare fraud crackdown will raise £4.3 billion, there’ll be a £10 billion surplus by 2029, her new borrowing facility will produce a profit of a hundred billion pounds by 2030.
Why does she say these things? Because Jupiter is in trine with a retrograde Saturn. That or the OBR says so, take your pick.
“Never again will it be possible to hide the true state of the public finances,” she said, hiding the true state of the public finances. Her new borrowing rules that allows “unconstrained borrowing” (Sunak) is based on “net debt” – but still doesn’t include net liabilities. There is a reason for that. The UK’s pension liability has so many zeroes attached to it they just don’t fit on any known spreadsheet. That and lockdown’s £500 billion black hole – something she enthusiastically backed – are the two commanding facts about the UK economy.
As, indeed, Rishi pointed out in his final address at the despatch box. No swan has sung more furiously. Over PMQs, he had played amiably with the one who Comments call 2TK. Cross-party cricket. Some hiking. Bit of war in Ukraine. He was reserving his wrath for the Chancellor’s moral and political failures.
Without ignoring Tory duplicity and mendacity, it is possible to relish Labour duplicity and mendacity.
Time and again, he said, she denied she would do what she has done. The half-trillion in Covid furlough payments, he said, were backed energetically by her, but his efforts to rebuild the public finances she opposed every step of the way.
The fiscal fiddling she swore she would never do she immediately did. What she had denounced as a tax on jobs, she at once imposed. Country first party second? An instant £9 billion bung to public sector pay. A £22 billion black hole? The OBR just now refused to corroborate it, “The figure appears nowhere in their report.” The “worst economic inheritance since the war” was the fastest growth and lowest debt in the G7.
Now his campaign prediction had come to pass. “You name it, they will tax it.”
Labour shouting has improved very considerably, but it didn’t completely refute what he was saying.
Labour had no real experience of business and no real understanding of economics. French-style labour laws and their economic catastrophising are inevitably anti-growth. “If you penalise and vilify” the people who create wealth, he said, it’s no wonder the economy stalls and confidence collapses.
On any practical assessment, it is impossible for Labour to stabilise the economy, fix the foundations, rebuild anything. The reason was sitting at the end of the Labour front bench, stroking his lips with a meditative forefinger. Ed Miliband’s sulfurous, Bond-villain vibe, is going to smother all Reeves’ “burning ambitions for Britain” with his net zero certainties. There is no better image for the fatal triumph of politics over economics.
Promises made, promises delivered she said more than once – prematurely, you might think. After all, it’s only the economic horoscopes say the promised goods will ever be delivered.
As a coda, Reeves named the official who is to run the Office of Value for Money. He is the same fellow who chaired Parliament’s Restoration and Renewal programme – a project that has rivaled HS2 for ballooning costs, environmental carnage and fabulous cash bonuses for its bosses. If this is a sign of administrative skill in appointments, sketch writers will be entering a golden age.
PS: the Minimum Wage and Laffer for the Left. The right celebrate the Laffer Curve which suggests there are times when lower taxes increase tax revenues (by encouraging economic activity). The Left reject that as heresy. But there are times when raising the minimum wage increases employment (by luring the work shy off the sofa). It all depends where we are on Laffer’s Curve. If employment rises as a result of the higher minimum wage, might the Left begin to believe in Laffer?
