He began with a touch of statesmanlike solemnity about the pandemic. ‘The British people may be worried but they are not daunted. We will protect this country and our people. We will rise to this challenge.’
This was Rishi Sunak delivering his first budget. Many viewers will not have seen him give a sustained performance before. He’s young, lean, smiley, mild-mannered. His thick rug of hair is worn with a schoolboy’s side-parting. Lots of teeth, oddly big ears. An ideal son-in-law type. But this isn’t the right look for a chancellor who should either resemble a mortician, (Stafford Cripps), or a voluptuary, (Nigel Lawson).
His vocal delivery has some strangely familiar quirks. The posh-boy voice is relaxed and super-confident. There’s a faint sibilance on the ‘s’s’. An unpredictable ‘z’ keeps popping into odd words – ‘the Conzertives are the party of public servizes’. There are hints of a London twang as well. The ‘t’ occasionally goes missing in ‘righ’ honourable gentleman’. He sounds very similar to Tony Blair.
If a Corbynite chancellor had delivered this spend-spend-spend budget he’d have been denounced as a Marxist fruit-cake
His message was simple. The virus will dent the economy but leave no lasting damage. However, cash will be needed. Lots and lots of cash. This was a blank-cheque budget.
He’ll raise no extra duty on beer, scotch, wine or cider. Bank loans will be guaranteed to help firms pay wages during the crisis. Hospitality outlets will enjoy an emergency business rate of zero this year (it could be tricky to reverse that in 12 months’ time.) Small firms already paying no business-rates will be eligible for a £3,000 cash injection.
Away from the figures, he promised goodies we can see and feel. He’s about to get his shovel out and plant 30,000 hectares of trees, (‘a forest the size of Birmingham’). And he’ll fill in 50 million pot-holes during this parliament. An army of new nurses is on its way. Concrete-mixers will shortly be churning as forty new hospitals rise from the loam. ‘That’s right,’ he cried. ‘Forty new hospitals!’
If a Corbynite chancellor had delivered this spend-spend-spend budget he’d have been denounced as a Marxist fruit-cake.
Some of his Keynesian pledges looked flat-out barmy. He’ll splurge £200 million on a government bank to invest in British businesses. He’ll sink another £5 billion into export loans and teams of ‘dedicated trade envoys’ to flog British goods from our embassies around the world.
A nice job, yes, but who will recruit and train these globe-trotting sales executives? You can’t just pluck the talent off the street. Remember when Corbyn threatened to install thousands of ‘business experts’ in Post Offices to help entrepreneurs? This could be the same scam but with an international dimension. It’s a heaven-sent opportunity for silver-tongued crooks keen to sample the club class lifestyle.
Sunak made two jokes. One good, the other ill-advised. Announcing that VAT on digital literature will be scrapped, he said, ‘no tax on factual books, no tax on works of fiction, and no tax on fantasy like John McDonnell’s Economics for the Many.’
His other gag was aimed at farmers. He outlined his thoughts on cheap ‘red diesel’ which he called ‘a 2.4 billion pound tax-break for pollution’. He plans to cancel the relief mechanism that slashes the price. This will cause Old MacDonald’s fuel bills to rise fivefold. And that was his little joke. In fact, he went on, agriculture will be exempt from the new measure. Farmers probably didn’t enjoy the gag as much as the comedians.
Was this a future PM in action? You’d have to say, he looked the part.
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