Would it take much to turn Philip Hammond into Dracula? He’s got the gaunt bearing, the unsettling gaze, the greedy overbite and the louring stature of the blood-sucking count. Add an opera cape and a dab of mascara and the costume would be complete. So it’s strange to see this vampiric figure delivering a budget full of happy tidings.
Our economy is growing, he grinned, faster than America’s or Japan’s. Tax revenues are up. Employment has reached a new zenith. Joblessness has dwindled to 11-year lows. And he didn’t even mention London. A lot of the best data comes from the midlands and the north. He’ll probably never have an easier ride in the Commons.
The jokes were good too. Rapier Phil has a sharp tongue and an expert delivery. You don’t see the blade coming until – swiiittt! – it’s through you and out the other side.
He was burbling away about arrangements ‘under the last Labour government,’ when he suddenly added, ‘they don’t call it the last Labour government for nothing.’ His reference to driverless vehicles attracted a cutting footnote: ‘a technology I believe the party opposite knows something about.’ And he said Jeremy Corbyn was ‘so far down a black hole even Stephen Hawking has disowned him.’
To the Tories this was hilarious. To Labour it was worse. It was true. Their front bench sat like a dock full of guilty publicans caught adding water to the beer. It was hard not to feel a stab of sympathy for these wannabes heading for the scaffold.
Jeremy Corbyn delivered a rather muddled Budget Response. Muddled because he’d written it before listening to the Budget to which he was responding. The result was a mixture of fibs and wishful thinking. He claimed that healthcare funding been cut when the Chancellor had just announced an increase. He declared that chief executives who earn 180 times more than the average worker are ‘taxed less.’ And he had an urgent bulletin for ‘the NHS crisis’. It’s now been promoted, on the battlefield, to a splendid new rank, ‘state of emergency.’
The main burden of his speech was a trip to his favourite resort, work-house Britain. He wanted to know why Scrooge Hammond had failed to assist the swarms of children being raised in poverty. Their parents, said Corbyn, endure the uncertainty of zero-hours contracts and rely on food banks for their daily sustenance. Their nippers grow up without ever seeing a library, a playing field or a SureStart centre. Every morning they leave home, breakfastless, and slouch to school along pavements seething with deadly toxins. When they arrive at their crumbling class-rooms they’re taught by depressed staff who’ve been forced to put up with a pay-freeze and an increased workload as they cover for colleagues driven from the profession by miserly Tory policies. And that’s just the good news. The bad news is that our army of emaciated whelps is due to grow by 25 per cent. Corbyn predicts that Britain will soon be home to five million kids on the bread-line. By which time we ought to qualify for development aid from Somalia. But the most nauseating thing of all, Corbyn revealed, is that when a minor dies its burial costs are borne by its family. He wants a world where every child gets a state funeral.
Throughout this torrent of miserabilism John McDonnell sat beside his leader, muttering, ‘they don’t care, they just don’t care.’ He’s right. The Tories don’t care. But it’s Labour they don’t care about. And the Tories aren’t alone.
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