CHANCELLOR Jeremy Hunt has scattered some scraps before the electorate in the hope of saving Tory skins at the forthcoming general election. All the signs are that it’s not working.
Nor does this zombie budget deserve to work.

The headline-grabbing bribes are worth more to the rich than to the poor. Yet even the Chancellor’s remaining friends in the City are unimpressed, if not downright sceptical. And with good reason, as Wednesday’s economic and fiscal outlook suggests.

In an unusually blunt summary near the beginning of its report, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) highlights the serious risks that could derail almost all present-day assumptions, estimates and forecasts, including those of the Chancellor and of the OBR itself.

As the report admits: “Historically large changes in energy prices, interest rates, wage growth and population growth have driven significant revisions to our recent economic and fiscal forecasts.”

To these destabilising factors, the OBR adds continued conflict in the Middle East, volatility in the City’s bond markets, highly uncertain levels of future migration, sluggish productivity, low economic activity rates in an ageing population, persistently high levels of household borrowing and debt, and the lack of detailed future departmental spending plans on the part of central government.

Undaunted, Hunt is relying on fresh predictions of higher economic growth — and therefore bigger tax revenues — to fund much of his further reduction in employee National Insurance contributions from April.

Introducing his cut of another 2p in the £, Hunt crowed about the Tory government’s belief that “those with the broadest shoulders” should “pay a bit more.”

In truth, his new measure will benefit higher earners the most: someone on £50,000 a year will save £1,310 — five times more than a worker on £20,000 and 15 times more than somebody on £15,000. It will cost the Treasury an extra £10 billion a year.

Unfreezing tax thresholds, on the other hand, would have targeted NI savings wholly in favour of the low-paid. Instead, the Chancellor’s NIC cuts will give back to working people just one-third of the extra amount he takes from them via the income tax threshold freeze over the next four financial years.

There were other sleights of hand, too.

The much trumpeted child benefit reform will only benefit households where the top earner is on more than £50,000 a year. The 6.7 per cent uprating for other claimants due in April does not meet the real increase in inflation for working-class families.

The abolition of “non-dom” tax relief for residents in Britain whose “permanent” home is elsewhere has been heralded in some quarters as a progressive move. In fact, a transition scheme gives wealthy tax-dodgers up to five years during which their highly rewarded tax advisers in the City can utilise other aspects of the new policy to minimise future liability.

All in all, the proposed new “non-dom” tax regime is reckoned to boost Treasury coffers by just £3bn a year, making nonsense of claims in the media that it will largely fund the NI reductions.

As for Hunt’s NHS and public-sector “productivity plan,” this means that any extra public spending will be funded by squeezing yet more unpaid labour out of public servants, while continuing to deny negotiating rights to their trade unions. As the OBR notes, the small increase in NHS spending plans is largely “revenue neutral” — in other words, the required cost savings are to be delivered by slave-driving the NHS workforce still harder.

Many millions of people across Britain face big increases in council tax this April and/or huge cuts in local services.

Local authorities have had their central government assistance cut by 40 per cent in real terms since 2010, and 12 English councils have issued bankruptcy notices over the past five years, with more to come.

Neither Hunt nor the secretary of state for “levelling up,” Michael Gove, have a universal, transparent and equitable plan to meet this enormous crisis.

Instead, the Conservative government’s response is a piecemeal hand-out of public money to its personal and political favourites. Wednesday’s Budget expanded this approach, with yet more cash injections for some of the most prosperous Tory-held seats in Britain, plus former Labour-voting seats snatched by the Tories in 2019.

Thus Hunt unveiled his third “trailblazer deal,” this time for a new combined authority mayor in north-east England. It’s part of the longstanding drive to weaken and marginalise democratically elected local government.

But nothing could match the £242 million “levelling up” funding announced for Canary Wharf in the City of London, not usually regarded as one of Britain’s poorer areas.

The extra money allocated to Scotland and Wales was old news and has already been factored into the devolved governments’ spending plans.

What has not happened is the reinstatement of an all-Britain regional development policy, transparent and equitable, using post-Brexit freedoms to direct private capital investment and public subsidies to where they are most needed.

Likewise, this Budget contained little or nothing to address Britain’s chronic housing crisis, or put in place a comprehensive training programme to turn out many more of the nurses, pharmacists, teachers, engineers and graphic designers we need.

Where is the upsurge of public investment required to guarantee energy security, based on a range of safe and renewable sources? Cloning more Sizewell C and Hinckley Point C nuclear power projects, with their monstrous delays and cost overruns, and their damaging uranium-related processes, is one of the worst possible responses to global warming.

The extreme weather consequences of climate change cry out for massive investment in our civil emergency services, in policies to withstand floods and coastal erosion.

If a Labour government is to meet these and other challenges, it will need the financial resources as well as the plans and the political will. Borrowing on the financial markets can play a part, but already it costs £116bn a year in interest payments (set to rise to £122bn by 2029).

Yet Britain’s capitalist class is one of the world’s richest, with lucrative economic and financial assets on every continent.

On the eve of the Budget, Richard Murphy of Tax Research UK published a report outlining policies that would raise substantial sums for public investment. Funding the Future proposes to:

End higher-rate Pension Tax Relief (raising £14bn a year).

Abolish the reduced NI rate for high earners (£12bn).

Levy a surcharge on investment and rental income (£18bn).

Align Capital Gains Tax rates with Income Tax (£12bn).

Impose VAT on financial services (£9bn).

Increase Corporation Tax on the largest companies (£7bn).

That’s an extra £72bn a year, even before considering windfall taxes on mega-profits, a financial transactions tax and a Wealth Tax on the super-rich. A portion of this additional revenue could even compensate for slashing VAT on essential goods, although price controls would be needed to ensure that consumers receive the benefit.

Shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves should take note and cease pleading poverty on behalf of Britain’s big business oligarchs.

They might be able to buy the Labour Party leadership, but they don’t own many of the votes that Labour requires to win the coming general election.

Robert Griffiths is general secretary of the Communist Party