‘Rachel Reeves and Keir Starmer’s Budget is just shopping for extra time on political demise row’
The PM and Chancellor are hoping their Budget will save their skins, says Fleet Street Fox. They’ll be lucky to make it past Christmas
You don’t need to be rich to dread the Budget on Wednesday. Being a normal, sane, compassionate human is enough to make you not want to watch when Chancellor Rachel Reeves stands up at the Despatch Box and delivers her own eulogy.
It will be the opposite of box office viewing. We know there’ll be tax rises, gloom, debt, cutbacks, accountancy sleight-of-hand and point-scoring. We know it’ll be delivered by a Chancellor of the Exchequer whose pitch-rolling skills are so poor she would have been fired in her first week as the Accrington Stanley groundsman.
After the best part of a year trailing, rowing back and leaking every possible Budget measure to see how they’d land with an increasingly-annoyed electorate and the City, the only thing we don’t know is what colour Rachel’s hair will be. She may do as she pleases with her own bonce, of course, but it cannot help market jitters to know that the person in charge can’t decide how to present herself to the world. It’s like a maths exam where a student keeps switching pens: you have to wonder why they think it helps.
Whether sensible Rachel is really a flippertyjibbet is a side issue, for what we do know is that she and Prime Minister Keir Starmer are not writing the Budget for us. They write it for the banks, the markets, the pollsters, and the party. We are worried about the cost of living, they worry about the cost of borrowing. And whatever sums you do, it keeps adding up to the fact they’re living on borrowed time.
Oh, they could give more money for this or that, a little bit here, have a tickle of your NHS waiting lists or a bit more child benefit there. They might talk about a mansion tax that people in mansions can easily avoid. But they have neither the money, nor the desire, to do anything radical.
They cannot borrow, slash and spend, because Liz Truss is still running around screaming like a forgotten extra from The Titanic. They cannot cut too hard, as then they’ll be Tories and the state would collapse in on itself like a dying star, and they cannot invest in what must be restored because there’s no bloody money. In short, they cannot change anything very much, but they and their enemies both need to say they’ve changed it loads.
That NOTHING will have changed on Wednesday, but everyone will say it HAS, will be dissonant enough. But throw in the fact that what won’t change is a stagnant outlook, businesses haemorrhaging jobs, the march of AI, rising costs of employment, war in Eastern Europe, tariffs in the world’s biggest economy, and a technological revolution at the same time as the ages-old movement of people from areas of social and economic decline, and what you have is an electorate that ONLY wants change.
No-one voted for Starmer and his government of sensible bobs and incompetent messaging. We voted against 14 years of Tories, and specifically against three disastrous post-Brexit premiers: Boffo, Bozo and King Croesus. What we got was less Latin, less eyeball-spinning lunacy, but a similar amount of entitlement and, more importantly, precisely the same problems. The only thing these two can change is the order for their last Downing Street meal.
Labour would probably be doing better if they’d won in 2029. The war in Ukraine should be over (although Putin may have begun a few more), Reform would have busted its flush, and the economy would have a chance of improving. There could be a good crack at overturning Brexit and trying to restore the markets we cut ourselves out of, which hurt Europe as much as it did us.
But Covid, Partygate and Tory tractor porn conspired against them, and swept Labour to power with a broad but shallow landslide in which no-one was convinced they’d do any better but probably couldn’t do any worse. And then they amazed us, with the Housing Secretary fumbling her council tax, a health minister saying an old person should die, a homelessness minister evicting her tenants, freebies, a punch-up, and a host of dodgy CVs. Even Peter Mandelson somehow found himself a horcrux and reanimated into being friends with a sex offender, just to zhuzh it up a bit.
With neither the will nor wherewithal to get economic rocket boosters going, Starmer and Reeves are as doomed as Strictly Come Dancing. The Budget is just something else we have to watch through our fingers, another step in the Starmer-Reeves danse macabre neither can break free from. The gossip is about the May local elections, but these meat-free turkeys will be lucky to get past Christmas. No matter what happens on Wednesday, it’ll add up to nothing but a little more borrowed time on Britain’s political death row.
