What a budget: Philip Hammond said he would consider measures to tackle the growth in the use of plastics during the budget and yet this was a budget that delivered more padding than substance. Perhaps he should impose a tax on that too.
But at its core there were deep and worrying messages within what Hammond had to say. The cost of Brexit is apparent: we are now going to have growth a lot lower than most of the EU. Growth is going to fall to 1.3% in two years time. And the investment in Brexit will, at an astonishingly small £3 billion, still be greater than the funding available for the NHS.
Included in that NHS funding was another interesting number: instead of the £350 million a week the NHS in England will get £350 million extra to see it through the whole winter.
But let's ignore the small numbers that proliferated throughout the budget statement. What they actually evidenced was three things. The first was a Chancellor out of ideas. His biggest cheer were probably for announcing that there will be no in change in VAT rules and that there will be some tweaks to stamp duty in England and Wales which all the evidence shows (because the move has been tried before) do not help first time buyers.
Second, they evidenced a Chancellor who cannot do anything radical even though so much within the economy (including the growth figures) demands it. That's because this government has no political capital to spend on taking risk on behalf of the people of the UK when all the political capital it has is being expended on Brexit and keeping the Democratic Unionists happy.
And third, the small numbers were there to disguise the fact that the big numbers were never mentioned. And what are the big numbers? They are the cost of a Brexit divorce settlement; the cost of a hard Brexit; and the cost to growth of being outside the biggest free trade group of nations we can ever be a member of. None of those were mentioned precisely because Philip Hammond, like the rest of the government, still pretends that Brexit is a cost free, risk free exercise when everyone knows that is not true, from the Office for Budget Responsibility onwards, despite which they also ignored it.
The result is that this whole budget really was an exercise in padding. It pretended something was happening for an hour or so in the parliamentary timetable when in truth Philip Hammond is sitting waiting for the economic time-bomb of Brexit to go off. That has not happened yet, but when it does almost nothing mentioned today will be of any consequence and every number that was spouted will prove to be spectacularly wrong.
Today's budget was probably the most inconsequential of those I have listened to for forty years, but there is trouble ahead, and we will have to face the music. Whether we'll dance is the question that's open to doubt.
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Totally agree. Disappointed.
One thing I had seen coming is the Purchase of land from all those planning consents not used (to keep house Prices up)
Growth falling means lower employment and lower wages.
The NHS is in big trouble too.
Fiddling while Rome* burns.
*Insert English town of your choice beginning with ‘R’ 🙁
I listened to this budget.
What a load of guff. I was not disappointed because I anticipated nothing of consequence.
It was a phoney budget for a phoney Government clinging on in phoney times.
BREXIT is the day of reckoning. Girdle your loins folks.
Pilgrim Slight Return says:
November 22 2017 at 5:04 pm
“I listened to this budget.”
What a load of guff. I was not disappointed because I anticipated nothing of consequence.”
It was reminiscent, I thought , of Theresa May’s Conference speech. As an exercise in the art of oratory it was not half bad, but suffered the similar total absence of content. A bit petty of Corbyn to pick him up on that – not quite cricket to criticise a chap’s speech simply because it doesn’t address real world issues. This is a debating club after all.
You have to admit, Pilgrim that he really suckered us with the driverless car business. We were totally gulled by that little conceit. The whole issue was a set-up for the Jeremy Clarkson gag. Now that’s what I call taking the job of entertainment seriously.
If he can maintain that standard, his future career in TV light entertainment is assured.
Do you want to take back end or front end of the pantomime donkey ? I think I can feel furry ears growing so perhaps better if you take the back end. Hee Haw!
“Girdle your loins folks.” I think it’s traditional to only ‘gird’ loins. Mind you what Tories do between themselves and in private is none of our business. The right wing in Madrid have an obsession with Basques. There’s no accounting for taste.
To ‘gird’ is to surround something with something else to support it. A ‘girdle’ can do exactly that.
So can we agree that its tight underpants for everyone from now on?
And plenty of fibre too.
I think this is going in directions most won’t want to follow….
P.S. Andy
He may have suckered you and others about driverless cars.
But he did not convince me. Not for one second.
I’ve grown very wary of this Government.
It is like the white cliffs of Dover. We as a country are navel gazing and irrelevant by the day.
Instead of competing we are declining with growth rates no better then inflation.
The effect of Brexit are yet to come. Complacency is setting in.
Hammond is worth £10 million so is not hungry or ambitious. May also has about the same saved up with her Husband.
Where is the motivation and the spirit to put up a fight ? Dis unity breeds contempt for each other and us.
Democracy needs prosperity to survive .
Just incase you do not read Polly Toynbee. Worth listening to her.
Polly Toynbee: Forget the details, only the big figures matter
Polly Toynbee.
On the tumbril goes, rumbling over the same old fiscal cobblestones. A welter of camouflaging little fillips fails to distract from the 2.5% loss of growth over the next five years.
​Hammond’s​ “balanced budget” shows how little the​ Tories​ learned from the downward plunge that began with Osborne’s first butchering budget. Never in modern times has growth fallen under 2% for as far as forecasts can see.
In this perfect Keynesian experiment, here’s final proof that cutting into a recession worsens it. As UK growth and productivity fall towards the G7 bottom, everything is pinched and shrivelled by these state-shrinking ideologues. And Brexit hasn’t begun.​
E​ven within their economy-strangling straitjacket, this government had plentiful choices. ​W​hy cut taxes for the rich and companies, or raise tax thresholds when most money goes to the better-off​, if Theresa May meant a word of her “burning injustices” speech?
The universal credit improvement is a tiny shift, when recipients still lose 63p in every extra pound they earn. Why cut benefits yet deeper, to reach a record-breaking 37% of children made poor? Stupid question: that’s what Tories do.
The NHS got less than half it needs to stay afloat, billions less than even the Office for Budget Responsibility says it needs. Will pay rises for its staff match inflation, let alone stem the exodus of nurses and GPs?
Forget housing: the real budget story is the sharp cut in growth forecasts
Larry Elliott
Larry Elliott Read more
​Zero for social care: watch this winter.
More housing? Ten years to reach 300,000 is modest, with the first-timers’ stamp duty cut a small sop, dwarfed by the £10bn wasted on the help-to-buy scheme that pours cash straight into big builders’ pockets. Ignore Tory front page good news splashes: just remember how many announcements never actually materialise.
Rarely has any government side of the House of Commons looked so like a rabble unfit to rule, the party of economic safety, no longer. Yet Hammond preserved his dignity while walking the Brexit tightrope. His “global Britain” “full of new opportunities” might just assuage his foaming-mouth Brexiteer enemies, while he never quite abased himself to pretend that leaving Europe is anything but the greatest storm-cloud darkening every page of his red book.
How long before the business world speaks publicly about Brexit?
I am sure things are being said before closed doors. If they speak out, I don’t expect them to change many minds among the determined leavers but there is a large group of don’t knows/ don’t feel they know enough. They might tip the balance towards reversing the decision.
It’s bizarre
They too seem to be hanging in in quiet desperation as if it’s the English way
(Thank you Pink Floyd)
My suspicion is that the people high enough up the big business food chain to gain any sort of hearing on Brexit are not particularly alarmed by the fallout. They will have their gold plated severance deals which will comfortably tide them over until new opportunities arise.
They can afford to ‘wait and see’. This class of very expensive hirelings, don’t forget, don’t actually own the companies they are employed by.
The SME owner managed companies don’t really have much of a voice do they? and the workforces have no voice at all in much of the private sector.
Good question. I’ve worked in multinational supply chains for a number of years, and the idea that we could get beyond March 2018 without knowing what the world will look like in March 2019 is unthinkable. No one who has worked in a large supply chain could think that can reasonably happen, the timelines for reorganisation projects are so long. Big business will have to launch multiple, major projects simultaneously to try and anticipate the future scenarios. If we’re still where we are now come March, I believe the current quiet warnings from industry will quickly turn into a scream.
I think the scream may be of agony
What a state the country is in when Corbyn responds by castigating Hammond for missing the deficit reduction targets obviously not having the faintest idea that because the private sector rarely optimises the economy in terms of employment and demand because of investment risk uncertainty (the central point in Keynes’s “General Theory”) the government plays an important role in making up for private sector under-investment by creating money from nothing or slashing taxes! Corbyn I’m sure hasn’t a clue that his support for Brexit is exacerbating the problem of private sector investment!
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/nov/22/jeremy-corbyn-budget-shows-tories-are-unfit-for-office
Much of Labour’s economic policy remains knee jerked and without principle to underpin it, I am afraid
The sentiments are right
The theory to deliver the actuality is required
Schofield says:
November 22 2017 at 9:22 pm
“What a state the country is in when Corbyn responds by castigating Hammond for missing the deficit reduction targets…..”
This is a classic example of the overwhelming power that comes from controlling the parameters of the political agenda.
It’s the old school uniform philosophy writ large. The rebellious tykes are allowed to snub the system by not wearing their hated caps, subject to being occasionally chastised for it. Or to wear their uniform in a slightly off beat way, wear their hair slightly too long or too short, hitch their skirt hems up or down to subversive altitudes relative to the knee or ankle. This effectively provides a whole range of pointless rebellion which enables the school to continue its social brainwashing.
Hammond tinkers with the economy and all the dissidents are allowed to do is complain about the minutiae of the tinkerings.
The best that Corbyn can hope to do is merely point out that the government is not even doing what it claims to be doing. He can hardly turn a Budget reply speech into a complete radical manifesto launch.
This IS how it works. It’s how it always has worked. We call it ‘democracy’, but it isn’t.
[…] http://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2017/11/22/a-budget-for-padding-and-missing-the-point/#sthash.2T1… […]
Here is someone’s view I trust on what has happened to Universal Credit in the budget:
http://blog.spicker.uk/tinkering-with-universal-credit.
As usual, mendacity abounds I’m afraid.
So it seems that both Hammond and May appear to be high net worth individuals who wish to make people with more moderate means poorer! Well what else did we expect? Seriously?
It could very well be that this ‘Band of Blunderers’ (HM Government) are putting on a brave face. But it seems more like denial to me to be honest.
But I’m beginning to see it as something else too.
What is being done to our country is simply evil and the people who are doing are doing it with intent. The Tories have not learnt a bloody thing.
You might be able to excuse Queen Mary burning people at the stake for having a difference of opinion about religion. But that was then.
We’ve supposedly advanced a lot since those days.
Such blind adherence to ideology by the Tories cannot be excused given the rich veins of alternative ideas out here.
The Tories in this guise have overstayed their welcome. And they continue to hurt us. They’ve gone too far. They are irredeemable.
And this country is on the way to being so too.
What does a well run economy based on a system of fair distributive justice look like? I don’t know because I’m not sure there has ever been one. I believe, however, that I hold sufficient information to judge how close our economy comes to a description of ‘good’. Instead of relying on selective, isolated data points to ‘prove’ how good it is I use a more anecdotal methodology taking 2010 as a start point.
Are more or less people able to access housing of an acceptable standard that they can afford?
The 217,000 homes claimed by government reduces to around 30,000 when an ‘affordable’ filter is applied.
Are the ‘austerity’ diseases (alcoholism, depression, malnutrition) higher or lower?
Suicide rates, food bank usage and the incidence of Rickets may provide clues to the answer.
Are all people having to work longer for less money and reduced conditions?
Local example 48.1% of working people where I live are paid the minimum wage or less.
In the same county a university chancellor already paid £450K is awarded a £17k rise students continue to pay £9k a year fees.
Is the pride of the welfare state, the NHS, in safe hands?
Big Pharma sees no moral issue with using a dominant position to increase the cost of a drug by 6000%. Community hospitals in my neck of the woods are being closed for the winter. An A&E dept is closed at night for the foreseeable future adding a minimum of 25 minutes delay to the access of treatment.
Is my right to judicial remedy dispensed in a way that is equal to that of others?
The recent judgement by the courts on Tribunal costs would suggest not.
I could use other relevant vectors for, instance the Police are selling off police stations and disbanding burglary investigation teams. I could delve into the acceptance of corrupt practices by businesses, banks defrauding customers are described merely as mis-selling and it triggers hundreds of billions from the magic money tree in state support but a genuine mistake on a benefit application is labelled as fraud and penalised automatically and harshly.
In all it looks to me like socio-economic apartheid.
Well Bill, we could look at Norway, or Iceland or Denmark, Finland or Sweden. They won’t be perfect as neo-liberalism has spread there too but it would be a start.
Socio-economic apartheid.
That’s a useful expression. Sums up what’s going on quite nicely.