𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓝𝓮𝔀𝓼

Rachel Reeves delivered a bombshell Budget on Wednesday. The Chancellor will hike welfare spending to record levels as tax rates near 40% of economic output. As for not clobbering ‘workin’ people’, over 1.7m workers will be dragged into paying tax for the first time or pushed into a higher band by a three-year freeze on income tax and national insurance thresholds. But let’s be real. This Budget wasn’t about saving the country but saving the skins of the PM and Chancellor.

From a mansion tax to reversing the two-child benefit cap (not for working Brits like Nigel Farage proposed, but for everyone including foreigners and welfare recipients) this was about placating Labour backbenchers. Already aggrieved at Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood’s Farage-lite illegal immigrant reforms – and underwhelmed by Wes Streeting’s strewardship of the NHS – the Labour Left was crying out for something to cheer about.

As Sir Keir Starmer and Reeves stare down the barrel of looming disastrous May local elections, this was a Budget to ward off leadership bids and backbench rebellion.

But in violating the spirit of the Labour manifesto – if not all its promises – Reeves and her boss are hardly setting the country up for long-term success. Instead it seems this Budget is principally designed to guard against Labour civil war.

Perhaps Nigel Farage is right when he warns this Government could implode before 2029. It seems inconceivable Labour MPs could topple their own government, with its massive majority, and risk – from their perspective – the far greater evil of a Reform UK government.

Yet, never underestimate Labour’s capacity to cut its nose off to spite its face. The risk of rebellion – or Labour MPs being wooed by Zack Polanski and Jeremy Corbyn – might have shocked the PM and Chancellor into a big-spending Budget with little solution to fix the country’s structural problems.

The OBR’s premature reveal of the Budget was far less scandalous than a laundry list of pledges which kicks Britain’s problems down the road, taxes workers to fund a ballooning welfare bill, and has as its focus the demands of a restless Labour Left, not a country demanding massive course correction.