"If you're Rachel Reeves, you use it to buy time. Time for Keir Starmer and you to carry on in office for a while longer, so perhaps your luck will change. Extra time for this unfortunate, empty, placeholder of a PM costs more than olive oil, but the chancellor still splashed out. This afternoon, she delivered a budget that was a 26bn attempt to buy her government some time."
"That 26bn will be paid not by businesses but by you and me, as taxes are pushed up to an all-time high. She will spend the cash to placate bond investors and calm down angry backbenchers by increasing the headroom to meet her own fiscal rules, and on measures such as scrapping the two-child benefit cap. And it will work, for a while. But even while many of those moves are good, they are small."
Chancellor Rachel Reeves unveiled a £26bn budget designed primarily to buy political time for Prime Minister Keir Starmer's government. The package raises taxes to an all-time high to fund measures that placate bond investors, increase fiscal headroom to meet fiscal rules, and address social issues such as scrapping the two-child benefit cap. Many measures are politically targeted and individually small, producing limited economic impact beyond temporarily calming markets and backbenchers. The budget aims to stabilize immediate political instability and investor confidence, but falls short of delivering transformational growth or reversing deep unpopularity for the leadership.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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