Rotten budget, again
Budgets that seem reasonable when they're announced often don't look anywhere near as good a day or so after, but this one was a stinker right from the start with, for example, its blatant but feeble attempt at electioneering with a small tax reduction (offset elsewhere).But, inevitably, it looks far worse in the aftermath. Dreadful is the Truss-level announcement about the plan to abolish NI without giving a thought to how that might be funded. And the one group who lose out are pensioners (who don't on the whole, for example, pay NI), who are the most likely group to vote for this benighted government: a staggering own goal. Yet another aspect, noted in the FT but curiously not trumpeted in the Tory press, is the decision to end the policy of letting local authorities keep all of the revenues from the sales of council homes. For the past two years this policy had reversed one of the nastiest of the odious Thatcher's policy of keeping the revenues for central government and was providing around a desperately needed £200mn a year to local housing budgets. So local authorities that are chronically short of money will be robbed of even more, just to help fund illusory tax cuts. What a hopeless chancellor Hunt is!
Richard Carter ● 973d44 Comments ● 968d