Balancing the Books

(Read on, or view here: https://youtu.be/OT86oMCBd5Q )

Problem is, there’s not enough to go round. No surprise in itself, but the lamentable extent of the shortfall is becoming increasingly apparent. And pleas for more are fast turning into demands, with menaces. The next flashpoint, little over a week away, could spill over many months to come.

Not only that, it may lay out the battle lines for the next four years. Because Keir Starmer’s being forced to fit the threat from Nigel Farage’s Reform Party into his reframed calculations.

A bit of context here, with apologies for the history lesson.

Last year’s Labour landslide might have looked similar to the one enjoyed by Tony Blair all those years ago, but in truth it was nothing like it.

In 1997 the punters were well up for change, what with Thatcher’s often very nasty medicine and then all those stories of sleazy behaviour by naughty Tory MPs.

But, while voters failed to give credit for John Major’s deft handling of the economy, New Labour certainly reaped the reward.

They got as lucky as the brutal but flamboyant king Henry the Eighth, who came to the throne with loads of cash to splash because his boring dad had watched the pennies.

Starmer, by contrast, found he had nothing to play with when he got the keys to Number Ten. Or, as he kept droning on, twenty-two billion pounds less than nothing.

Rishi Sunak and his, ahem, succession of predecessors, had spend their years in office trying to pretend we were doing pretty well while everyone else could see that we weren’t.

Hence the Tories’ comeuppance last July. But hence also the sea of troubles that Starmer’s clearly half drowning in.

Which is where the current Conservative leader, Kemi Badenoch, comes in. Or, more likely, bows out.

Having signally failed to make any dent in her side’s unpopularity, she’s clearly a goner. The rumbling’s getting louder all the time, and it’s only a matter of when.

Question is though, is it the party itself that’s down the tubes?

With the polls putting his lot way out front, Nigel Farage is starting to look credible as not just the real opposition leader but potentially our next Prime Minister.

Odd, really, when you consider that Reform has just five MPs while the Tories have twenty-four times that number. And, btw, we are still four years from the general election.

However, Farage certainly made a splash last week, sort of promising everything for sort of everyone, and Starmer went to a lot of trouble to diss his every word.

In his retaliatory speech the Prime Minister namechecked his insurgent foe no fewer than sixteen times, hammering home his message that the man is Liz Truss mark two.

His point being that Truss, famously compared to a lettuce on account of her extremely short shelf life, did nearly crash the economy by promising unfunded tax cuts.

And parts of Farage’s prospectus did, similarly, unravel within days.

As part of his anti-woke crusade, he said he’d do away with folk working on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programmes, thus saving taxpayers a cool seven billion pounds a year.

The only problem being that figures released shortly after by the Cabinet Office showed that the entire project had cost less than half of one per cent of that amount.

Which tends to add weight to the Times sketch writer Tom Peck’s gloriously sardonic take on the subject:

‘The two main parties have all promised the earth and delivered next to nothing. People are fed up. Isn’t it time to let Farage do exactly the same?’

Rather more soberly, the respected Institute for Fiscal Studies has checked his entire prospectus and concluded that: ‘The sums, to be blunt, don’t really add up.’

There is, however, an underlying and deadly serious political point to be made here.

While Farage, in his Tigger-ish way, probably made people smile with his admission that his savings goals could be ‘slightly optimistic’, Starmer’s bucketloads of Eeyore didn’t.

Not that that’s stopping him from plodding on in a kind of arms race with his Reform rival.

He has, belatedly perhaps, finally agreed to ease back on his hated plan to take away the winter fuel allowance for nearly all pensioners. How far and when as yet undisclosed.

Farage, by contrast, has announced he’d give it back in full. He’s also said he’d ditch the policy of only giving parents the often vital tax and benefit leg-ups for their first two children.

Starmer had categorically ruled out abolishing this cap, which was introduced years ago by the Tories. But, hey presto, he’s now dropping broad hints that he will after all.

All of which adds weight to the growing consensus among the money geeks that, come the autumn budget, Labour will also have to U-turn on its pledge not to push up taxes.

But before that we have the other big fiscal event of the year, the so-called Spring Statement.

Less than a fortnight away now, it’ll be the Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ moment for setting out how much each chunk of government will have to play with.

None of it will be enough, of course, so ministers are currently desperately fighting their respective corners, some leveraging their claims with threats.

On the welfare front they’re warning of large-scale backbench rebellions, and in health and education they’re citing the threats of strike action by doctors, nurses and teachers.

The widespread industrial action last year was yet another nail in the Tories’ collective coffin. And even though public support for the medics has dwindled that won’t hold them back.

Ms Reeves has changed her own rules, to the extent of boosting borrowing by billions, so she can splash out on infrastructure and social housing, and schools, hospitals and prisons.

But all this stuff takes years to turn into things that people can see or live in, unlike day-to-day improvement in services, that she’s set her face against paying for with extra money.

Which begs the question that occurs to many of us when we go abroad for hols – how come things so often don’t seem so threadbare sur le continong as they so clearly are here?

The answer calls to mind that extraordinary story of a week or so back about the bloke in Norway who managed to sleep through a stonking great cargo ship crashing into his garden.

Though it ended up just a few yards from Johan Helberg’s waterfront home, the first he knew about it was a neighbour frantically ringing his bell to check he was all right. Baffling though it may be that anyone could miss anything as blindingly obvious as that, it might be worth asking ourselves if we Brits can’t also be a bit dozy.

Fact is, whatever Nigel Farage might have to say on the subject, we can’t expect European standards of public service on American levels of taxation. It just can’t be done.

Admittedly that looks like a hard sell for any aspirant or sitting government. But will this one give it a go, come the budget?

Best not hold your breath, but you never know.