Maybe it had been one of the greatest acts of political genius after all. The day after the budget is usually the moment when things start to fall apart. When clued-up journalists and economists have had a chance to go through all the fine points the chancellor would rather everyone had missed. The forecasts that suggest everything is predicated on a wing and a prayer. The hidden unfunded tax cuts. The greater-than-expected spending commitments.
But on Thursday morning Andy Burnham and John Healey could afford themselves a sigh of relief. All had gone about as well as they could have hoped. It turns out that when you don’t make any massive tax or spending commitments, there isn’t a great deal to unravel. All there had been was a raft of small-scale interventions designed to help people with their personal finances. Call it the Martin Lewis budget. In fact, Healey and Lewis now seem unable to get through the day without spending some time with each other. They certainly can’t stop talking about one another. It’s becoming unhealthily co-dependent. The gods of small things.
It had been billed as the “breathing space” budget. A budget to help get everyone through the coming year more or less alive. No hiding under tables or breaking open the emergency supplies of baked beans. Apocalypse averted. But the breathing space might just as well have been for the government. Difficult decisions delayed. Hope that we all wake up in ۵۲ weeks’ time and the world looks like a less frightening place. And even if it doesn’t, it will always have had a year’s grace. A chance for the Tories and Reform to implode. You can always hope.
Come the traditional morning-after interview with the chancellor on the Today programme, the presenter Nick Robinson seemed uncharacteristically subdued. Normally he’s a terrier on occasions like these. There’s never been a budget that Nick wouldn’t have been able to do far better himself. But this one? This one was something you might find on the consumer affairs programme, You and Yours. And the BBC was in the process of axing that.
So the ۲۰ minutes passed with little fuss. More a softball back and forth. Healey started with his usual infectious brand of pessimism. He was born to be the bearer of bad news. The poster boy for assisted dying. Everything was absolutely terrible. He wasn’t quite sure why anyone was still bothering with anything. If it had been up to him he would have ended the interview before it had started. There was nothing to say. Other than that, given the chance, he wouldn’t have started from here. Brexit, the pandemic, Ukraine, Iran, energy prices. The world was screwed. Britain was screwed. Lie back and prepare for the worst ۱۰ years of your already miserable life.
Nick tried to find a reason to believe. Couldn’t the chancellor have made just a little more effort? Having a plan to have a plan wasn’t the usual budget fare. Healey, AKA Dr Death, shrugged. It was one up on having a plan to not have a plan. By now Robbo was audibly struggling. How could he put it politely? In the third year of a government with a ۱۶۰-seat majority, surely Healey could have been a little more ambitious. This wasn’t exactly the big transformation that had been promised.
Could he even say if he would bring down the benefits bill? Apparently he could. “There will be a reduction in the benefits bill,” said Dr Death. Cue panic stations in the Treasury. Within seconds of Healey opening his mouth, dozens of government spinners were on the phones to every journalist to tell them they hadn’t heard what they had just heard. There had been collective false consciousness. When Healey had said that he would be bringing down a benefits bill that everyone agreed was too high and that the country could not afford, what he had really meant to say was that he would not be bringing down the benefits bill that he had no idea how to pay for. Fag packets gratefully received. That was about as close to news as we got.
Maybe it was just that while Healey was having one of his better days, Robinson was having one of his worse ones. Because he had also sounded uninterested in his interview with Andrew Griffith an hour earlier. An exercise in box-ticking rather than revelation because the shadow chancellor never has anything useful to add on the day after. Sure enough, Griffith insisted that he would have done everything differently while never going into the details of how. At which point, Robbo opened half an eye and observed that if it was really that easy, how come the Tories hadn’t fixed it when in office?
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Indeed, Nick continued, it could be argued that Labour had been left to clear up the mess the Tories created. “I’ve never shied away from saying that the Tories have a chequered record,” Griffith said defensively. Er, I’m not sure that’s entirely true, Andrew. Your usual line is that history started in ۲۰۲۴ and that everything is the Labour government’s fault.
That just left time for Robinson to remind the shadow chancellor that he had been part of the Treasury team that had defended the Liz Truss mini-budget even as it was being shredded. “I will never publish plans without saying where the money is coming from,” said Griffith, before announcing £۳۰bn of planned tax cuts without specifying which benefits he would cut to pay for them. Fair to say, he’s not a man who seems to learn from experience. Once in the Truss image, always in the Truss image.
The final piece of the Thursday jigsaw was the verdict from the Institute for Fiscal Studies. In the past this has been enough to completely destroy the reputation of some chancellors. I could never look at George Osborne in quite the same way after the IFS had rubbished one of his budgets. It’s one thing to be thought of as an economic quarter-wit. What’s really devastating is to have it proved.
Helen Miller, the IFS director, looked a bit knackered. She and her team had been up most of the night, going through both the budget and the OBR figures line by line, searching for the fatal flaw. And she was gutted to announce that there actually wasn’t one. There was as little in the budget as had first appeared. She announced that she was grumpy about some measures. Disappointed in others. Another was cack-handed. The tax system had been made more complicated, not less. Yet, all in all, these were minor gripes.
“This chancellor is hoping that things get better without actually needing to do anything,” Miller said in conclusion. I don’t think that’s right. Healey never travels in hope. Like the rest of us, he’s pretty confident everything is going to be worse in a year’s time. But he had got himself some breathing space.
