Chancellor Offers Peanuts and Pretends It’s All Peaches

Like all things in modern British politics, Wednesday’s budget was hyped up in advance only to disappoint in its delivery. Even Conservative Chancellor Jeremy Hunt’s own colleagues in Parliament have been left discouraged. And his critics outside of the House of Commons are all the more bemused.

William Clouston, leader of the economically left-leaning and culturally traditional Social Democratic Party (SDP), told The European Conservative that Hunt’s speech amounted to “the last tinkering of a government that will soon be brutally dispatched from office.”

He added that less than a week after Rishi Sunak pandered to the Left in a speech on Islamist extremism by equating this to the ‘far right,’ the prime minister’s right-hand man had pandered to the very same identity-obsessed groups by opening his address with a promise to put up £1 million (€1.17 million) for a Muslim war memorial.

The headline announcement in Hunt’s budget was a two-pence cut to National Insurance, one of the two main sources of taxation on income. Conservatives say this will save the average worker £450 (€525) a year—that is, less than £40 (€43.80) a month.

There had been a lot of talk about a potential cut to income tax, the main UK tax on earners. This proved fruitless, much to the frustration of Conservative MPs (though only because this will be bad for their polling). Pro-pensioner campaigners said the decision not to cut income tax will leave elderly voters “bitterly disappointed” since they won’t benefit from a cut to National Insurance, which they do not pay.

In a speech full of cheap, university-style jibes, as most Commons addresses are, the Chancellor also promised to increase the threshold for VAT registration, saving smaller businesses money, and to hand a further £120 million (€140 million) to net zero-associated projects, pushing total funding for the Green Industries Growth Accelerator to almost £1.1 billion (€1.29 billion).

These measures will be funded by, among other things, a new tax on vapers, against whom the Conservative Party is waging a war, and the extension of a heavy tax on oil and gas firms.

SDP leader William Clouston told The European Conservative that the budget really ought to be judged against three criteria:

First, does it address the fundamental causes of our economic problems?—we save too little, spend too much, produce too little and consume too much.

Secondly, how will it deal with the labour market crisis?—we have millions on out-of-work benefits and import millions of low-skill workers.

Third, how will it increase GDP growth? Mobilising a large-scale housing programme is the best way to achieve this—the low-hanging fruit.

In all these key criteria the budget fails.

Clouston added that to make matters worse, the likely incoming Labour government has “no better ideas on addressing Britain’s economic decline.”

The stupidity of the whole affair was topped off by the top placement by the Mail, one of the most-read news websites in the world, of an article describing how Hunt “fat shamed” Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer, which he did not. Even just a little insight into the analytics pages of mainstream British news sites would suggest this could easily rank among the most-read articles on the budget today.

Perhaps almost as silly was the fact that Hunt insisted he believes “lower taxes mean higher growth,” while forecasters say the British tax burden is on track to hit its highest level since 1948. It appears they do not believe the Chancellor’s speech has done enough to change this course.