One week you’re fighting to survive the dance-off amid vicious backstage rivalries, the next you’re scoring a perfect ten from Bruno Tonioli for your shimmering tango. As it was on Strictly for Debbie McGee, so it was — well, almost — for Philip Hammond at the despatch box. Unlike many of the Budgets of his predecessors Osborne and Brown, this one did not unravel immediately or prove full of black holes and political tricks. Clear in its analysis, frank in its forecasts, limited in its objectives, it took modest steps to ease the housing crisis and encourage entrepreneurs — and not much else.
But it was enough to be hailed as a turning point in Tory fortunes and it was followed by Business Secretary Greg Clark’s ‘industrial strategy’, which again met more praise than scorn, though it clearly represents no more than ‘a decent first step’, as the CBI put it, towards addressing endemic problems of low productivity and skills.
Clark’s pledges to pump an extra £2.3 billion into research and development, but not until 2021-22, and to bring the UK up to the OECD average R&D spend, but not until 2027, come nowhere near justifying his own claim of ‘an unashamedly ambitious vision’. But he got away with it in a week when the public mood was receptive and Labour’s responses made no impact at all.
Plus, there was reassuring news from the Bank of England, which declared that the major UK banks are sufficiently well capitalised to withstand an imaginary crisis in which house prices would fall by a third, unemployment would double, GDP would plunge and the banks would collectively lose £50 billion — enough to have wiped them out a decade ago.
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