BRITAIN needed an emergency Budget today, one that addressed the profound crises facing local authorities, healthcare, education, you name it.
It got nothing of the sort. A scattering of headline investments like the “NHS productivity plan,” focused on IT systems and ignoring the staff shortages that have led to waiting lists seven million long.
A 2p cut to National Insurance that benefits higher earners more and, by reducing the tax take, tightens the funding squeeze on essential services. Bigger cuts to capital gains tax, incentivising the property speculation that has helped drive the housing crisis.
It was a complacent Budget, Chancellor Jeremy Hunt spending longer trying to explain away Britain’s “technical” recession as some kind of economic success (the same Chancellor said last year he was “comfortable” with Bank of England policy causing a recession to reduce wages) than he did outlining new measures that might make a difference.
Britain has “turned the corner” on inflation, he claims, though prices rising more slowly doesn’t mean prices falling and millions of us know what we pay for food, energy and a roof over our heads has soared in recent years.
Soon, he insists, it will “turn the corner” on growth. Labour is right to rip into these preposterous claims. Right to say the country is in “tatters” after 14 years of Tory misrule (five of them in cahoots with the Lib Dems, whose role in Royal Mail privatisation and crippling local government funding cuts we should not forget now the chickens are coming home to roost).
The health service has 100,000 vacancies. Schools are literally crumbling. Our railway network, plagued with cancellations and delays, has investment stripped back and further cuts planned.
Letters can no longer be delivered on time, though Royal Mail, that squandered a £700 million annual profit on shareholder payouts just three years ago, has raised the price of stamps three times in a year.
On Tuesday evening protesters rallied in Birmingham as Europe’s biggest local authority announced a programme of municipal devastation, the elimination of the arts budget, cuts to waste disposal and street lighting, the closure of over two-thirds of the city’s libraries, all while residents pay through the nose with steep council tax rises. People fixating on budget mismanagement or equal pay claims as causes can’t see the wood for the trees: this is a tragedy being played out in councils in every corner of Britain, a crisis coming soon to a town hall near you.
It is no surprise that the government, in what we trust will be its last Budget, neither acknowledges nor addresses the sustained investment required across a host of public services, not least in a workforce where two in five workers are now looking for the exit because they are overworked and underpaid.
But it is a serious problem that the Labour Party, while happy to fling insults at the Tories for wrecking the economy and leaving ordinary people poorer, is committed to continue all the policies that have led us here.
Using high debt and a bleak economy to plump for cuts rather than investment was exactly the line of David Cameron and George Osborne in 2010, and it’s reborn in the mouths of Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves.
Starmer’s very claim that the Tories have “maxed out the credit card” repeats the deliberately misleading comparison of a national economy to a household budget that the Tory axemen used in the 2010s.
There is plenty of money. Last month Britain’s Big Four banks announced their highest annual profits ever.
We see record-breaking profits in the energy cartels, big agribusiness, soaring profit margins in the FTSE 350 table of big companies. These aren’t “difficult economic circumstances.” It is class war.
And if Labour won’t strike a blow for workers in that war, unions will need to find another way to change our country’s direction.
