You have to have a Budget to gain parliamentary sanction for spending and investment for the coming financial year. So it has to happen. But it does not have to be politically dramatic, nor does it have to be re-constructional, nor does it need to be a framework for economic remodeling. But this Budget needed to be all three, because the work has to begin to equip this country to prosper under whatever form of Brexit we are forced by circumstances to submit. This means changing an economic model which sucks wealth from the many to the few, relies on asset inflation, and creaks under a taxation framework designed in the first half of the twentieth century, now utterly unfit for purpose. The consequences are everywhere to be seen and are felt by the majority of families all across the land.
Yet the show stopper of Hammond’s debut effort yesterday was a big hit on the self-employed. What a blunder! You cannot reform taxation by hitting at minorities bit by bit. They at once feel put upon because they are not part of the big picture. They are carrying the load for everybody. Why? Because says Phil, who has clearly lost the plot, they get the same benefits as everybody else and they should pay the same tax. Dear me. They do not get holiday pay or sick pay or maternity leave if they are small or start ups, because if they are not working no money comes in. So they have to provide all that for themselves and paying less tax helps them to do that.
This is politically peculiar for another reason. Most economists tell us that without immigration and the growth in self-employment, there would be no economic growth at all. This government is hitting both. Moreover this fragile growth is nearer stagnation than real expansion, which is why we are continuing to live in perpetual austerity. Last of all most self employed people vote Tory. But they also voted Remain. Suppose they switch, as they have before, to the Lib Dems, especially in the South and South East? There is a phrase for that in Tory HQ. Ooh err….