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Pay is the big issue on Budget day, but does Labour understand this?
TOMORROW’S Budget will be presented, like all of its kind, as a success story.
The government will announce significant-sounding spending commitments to tackle issues like the backlog in NHS operations and its readiness to lift the freeze on public-sector pay, but within a framework of spending restraint.
As in the spring, Chancellor Rishi Sunak may prove capable of wrongfooting the opposition in the process. Then, a mooted rise in corporation tax tricked Keir Starmer into loudly opposing such a move, undermining Labour’s claim to stand for a redistribution of wealth; having watched the party take the bait and infuriate its core supporters, Sunak then announced a sufficient delay to the proposal to render it hypothetical and irrelevant.
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In the first of two articles, ROBERT GRIFFITHS argues that despite a parliamentary majority, Labour’s timid Budget fails to seize a historic opportunity and lacks the ambition needed to address Britain’s deep social and economic crises
