LABOUR’S Budget will still feel like austerity to many.

The Chancellor’s recent Budget promised a clean break from Tory austerity. Labour governments in England and Wales promised a “partnership of power” — two governments working together — but there was little good news in Wednesday’s announcements for Wales.

After 14 years of relentless cuts to public services, massive transfers of wealth from public to private hands, stagnant wages not seen since the Napoleonic era, a revolving door of prime ministers and a mini-Budget that triggered a severe cost-of-living crisis, Rachel Reeves’s Budget held some promise to deliver the transformative change that, during the general election, we were told would come.