Jeremy Hunt is the spotty, speccy geek who doesn’t wear specs and doesn’t have spots. But ‘geek’ is very much Hunt’s brand. He’s a gangly, uncool type who, for no reason whatever, is as tall as a basketball player.
In his Budget he set out to promote Continuity Conservatism, and spoke as if this were a mid-term financial plan from a steady-eddie Tory administration. He kept saying ‘since 2010’ as he boasted of Tory achievements that go back 14 years. He claimed that ‘800 jobs’ had been added ‘every day’ since the Conservatives took power and he said that they’d hired ‘250 more doctors and 400 more nurses for every month we’ve been in office.’ He fired off easy shots at the rowdy Labour benches. When he mentioned Universal Credit he fell silent for a moment and waited for them to yell at him. Which they did. Then he slapped them down sanctimoniously: ‘I thought they cared about people on the lowest incomes.’
Deputy speaker, Eleanor Laing, lost patience with the Labour hecklers who barracked the Chancellor throughout. She had to apologise to Hunt for constantly interrupting him: ‘Please shout more quietly,’ she begged the Labour rowdies.
Hunt ignored the technical recession and used OBR statistics to predict modest growth. Recovery will be sluggish this year and the next but, in 2026, according to the OBR, there’ll be a sudden spurt of 2.2 per cent. It’s no surprise that the economy is as dead as a frozen haddock. All the fat is being gobbled up by the state sector which is already dangerously obese. And Hunt is keen to shovel even more sugar-rich gruel into its chops. He’s about to splurge £3.4 billion on a ‘productivity plan’ to digitise the NHS. This probably means a few apps to take care of spreadsheets and timetables. So why does it have to cost billions of pounds? A few techies could do the job for a hundred grand. But the NHS can only deal with gargantuan sums of money. Hunt predicted that his £3.4 billion upgrade will ‘unlock £35 billion in savings’. But he gave no evidence for this fantastic claim. If he can trim £35 billion from the budget, he must know where he’ll deploy those vast savings. But he didn’t say.
More Stalinist pledges came spilling out of his mouth
More Stalinist pledges came spilling out of his mouth, including ‘200,000 extra operations, 130,000 speedier results, and thousands of lives saved.’ Somewhere in the list he said that ’13 million lost hours’ would be recovered or restored or something. Maybe the figure was ‘30 million hours.’ It scarcely matters. Just checking that pledge would cost millions of pounds in pointless research.
Hunt’s hour-long speech was entirely wasted on Rishi Sunak. The PM, seated just behind the chancellor, was busy exchanging whispers with the chief secretary to the Treasury, Laura Trott. They chatted away constantly, their faces close, their smiles eager, their eyes bright and happy. They seemed utterly engrossed in each others’ pleasantries. Perhaps they were gossiping about inflation or the new thresholds for child benefit. If so, economics has never been so fascinating.
Rishi didn’t interrupt his tete-a-tete with Trott even when the topic of non-doms was mentioned. Mrs Sunak once opted to enjoy this special tax status which the Labour party have constantly vowed to abolish. Hunt jumped in today and announced its replacement with a ‘simpler, fairer, residency-based system.’ His new rules will encourage non-doms to transfer their global assets to this country, and he suggested that an extra £1 billion in tax will be raised. Easy as that, apparently. It’s a wonder the Tories didn’t scrap non-dom status 14 years ago. Maybe they hung onto it just to annoy the opposition.
Listen to Katy Balls, Kate Andrews and the OBR’s David Miles discuss the Budget on Coffee House Shots:
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