Peter Hoskin

The shape of the Budget battleground

There are still two days and a couple of hours to go until George Osborne’s Pre-Budget Report — but, already, we have a good idea of what will be said. The emphasis, beyond just plain ol’ jobs and growth, will be on combatting youth unemployment; helping smaller businesses; and relaxing the squeeze on middle-income folk. Most of the measures either announced or suggested so far — from the Youth Contract to the credit easing scheme to the suspension of January’s fuel duty rise — fall into one of those compartments. Whether they’ll work or not is a different matter entirely.     

As for Labour’s response, they’re already making it — and I doubt anything in the actual Budget document, or the growth review, will change it much. It, too, appears to have three main components.

First up, there’s the female factor. Yvette Cooper has been arguing ever since Osborne’s first Budget that the deficit reduction programme is impinging more on women than on other groups — and there’s some truth in that, not least because women make up a greater proportion of the public sector workforce. (In which case, the same would probably have been true under Labour cuts, but Cooper won’t admit that, of course). But it’s striking just how much this attack has been reinforced across recent weeks. Cooper herself has written an article on the subject with her new tag team member, Rachel Reeves, for PoliticsHome today. Angela Eagle is providing them with support. And that’s before we get onto all the parliamentary questions that have probed and prodded the Tories’ women troubles recently. Labour have seen those opinion polls, and they’re keen to exploit the matter.

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