Ambition deficit

Some Budgets are historic, most are boring and a small number can be remembered as a disaster. After just a few months, Philip Hammond has managed a budget – his first – that can be placed in this last category. Economically, it made very little difference. Politically, it is shaping up to be a disaster.

His Budget was supposed to have been conducted under the pledge, issued no fewer than four times in the 2015 Conservative manifesto, that his party not raise taxes. ‘Instead, we will ease the burden of taxation,’ the Tories promised. It seems plausible enough, and the Conservatives were returned with an absolute majority. Whatever else one might have thought about David Cameron, he had shown he was a Prime Minister who kept his promises.

But Mr Hammond has a more elastic approach to promises, and seems to stretch words like an accountant seeking a tax loophole.  He wishes to splurge on infrastructure, and his instincts appear to favour larger rather than leaner government. A Chancellor in pursuit of higher government spending will have a hunger for other people’s money. It has led him to speak about the self-employed as if they are tax dodgers, are somehow using the NHS without paying for it properly. So there has been a fundamental change in the Conservative Party’s attitude since the general election: a promise not to raise taxes for the self-employed has been replaced by an agenda to target them.

So the self-employed – who now make up 15pc of workers – have been told that their National Insurance tax rate will rise by 2p in the pound. Mr Hammond spoke in technocratic language, saying it is an anomaly that the self-employed pay National Insurance at a lower rate than staff employees. Set aside the reasons for this (most self-employed have no holiday entitlement, sick leave or other benefits) this whole line of argument is one that the Tories pledged not to pursue. The