Most chancellors pull a rabbit out of a hat during their Budget statements – something to delight their own MPs and leave the opposition feeling outmanoeuvred.
Such has been the atmosphere of doom and gloom generated by Rachel Reeves in advance of hers that there is a temptation to envisage her plonking a boiled bunny on the Commons despatch box and exclaiming: ‘It’s Halloween tomorrow, so grab a load of that!’
And yet Ms Reeves will surely at least attempt to conjure up the vista of some sunlit economic uplands after four months of exaggerated complaints about the financial inheritance passed down by the Tories.
Better resourcing of ‘Our NHS’ will be cited as the key to ensuring Britain has a fitter and more productive workforce
Her marathon whinge, centred around her having identified an in-year financial ‘black hole’, has clearly been designed to excuse an impending raft of tax rises she spent the entire election promising would not be needed. But it has undoubtedly had effects upon the real economy, crushing the animal spirits of investors. Bond yields – the margin lenders insist upon for lending to the Government – have also begun to creep up, though not nearly as fast as they did before the doomed Kwasi Kwarteng budget of 2022.
Thanks to an industrial-scale Treasury pre-briefing operation, many observers think they already know all Ms Reeves’ significant announcements – chapter and worse, as it were. Commons Speaker Lindsay Hoyle takes that view, having predicted that there could be plenty of spare seats in the chamber, during a notably angry condemnation of the Chancellor’s ‘supreme discourtesy’ to the House.
We already know there will be a big rise in the minimum wage next year, which will be welcome among the 1.6 million workers in receipt of it but less so among their employers. The overall economic impact of continually pushing what is now known as the ‘national living wage’ closer to median earnings is surely due some critical scrutiny too. My own view is that the policy is starting to incentivise people to stay in low productivity, entry-level positions rather than upskilling and aiming for promotions, which is hardly sensible. It also risks demoralising those further up the chain as they see their differentials getting badly squeezed.
Rishi Sunak is hardly likely to go for that line of attack given that he drove the policy in the first place during his own chancellorship. Yet he will present a formidable opponent for Ms Reeves in what will be his last significant contribution at the top of British politics. He will be facing the massed ranks of 400 Labour MPs and only have a small contingent of supporters at his own back – think Southampton playing away at Fratton Park – but will be keen to show the British public what they are soon to be missing.
More money for schools and hospitals is standard Labour budgetary fare, so we will probably get that today. I’m guessing promises of more extra NHS funding than anyone expects will be today’s rabbit. Wes Streeting will beam, Labour spin doctors will lick their lips at the thought of exploiting the politically perilous territory Kemi Badenoch wandered into during her recent interview with Sky’s Sophy Ridge about reimagining healthcare from first principles.
We will be invited to forget the huge raids on employer national insurance, possible capital gains tax pain, the Inbetweeners-style insults to bus users and the rows about who is or isn’t a working person.
Better resourcing of ‘Our NHS’ will be cited as the key to ensuring Britain has a fitter and more productive workforce that can get the country off its economic knees. Labour MPs will cheer and wave their order papers like maniacs.
Perhaps the settlement will be so generous as to bring about the re-forming of the many Covid-era hospital dance troupes and a rash of celebratory videos online. Will it work this time? Quite possibly. The British public may be more sceptical about the NHS these days but much of Labour’s traditional voter coalition is still easily scared by the far-fetched notion of a US-style alternative being imposed by those nasty Tories.
Reeves’s message in her House of Horrors Budget will be that it is those on the opposition benches who are really the scary ones.
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