Chris Mason: A change-making Budget but a moment of jeopardy

This was a huge, change-making budget.

Don’t let anyone tell you there isn’t much difference between the main parties at Westminster.

This was a Budget with Labour’s instincts and worldview stamped throughout it.

There are the tax rises visible from near-earth orbit, the self imposed borrowing rules shredded and re-written – to allow more borrowing – and big wads of spending for the NHS, just for starters.

I lost track during the election campaign of how often Labour folk insisted they had “no plans” to put up taxes beyond a relatively narrow band of those they said would rise.

Looked at now you don’t have to be wildly uncharitable to conclude that was comprehensive baloney.

Labour, psychologically scarred by losing far more elections than they win, tend to try to hug the Conservatives close when it comes to tax and spending plans before elections where they think they can beat them, fearing anything else will spook swing voters and cost them the contest.

And, pretty much, that is what Labour did back in the summer.

No such caution now.

The books were worse than we thought is Labour’s mitigating plea, garnished with a we-won’t-do-it-again insistence from the chancellor in my interview with her.

“This is not the sort of Budget we would want to repeat,” Rachel Reeves told me.

For the chancellor, we now enter the valley of maximum scrutiny and jeopardy for her prospectus.

Journalists, policy experts, industry, trade unions, you as readers have a chance to properly squirrel away at the detail and ask awkward questions.

You will see the chancellor on BBC television and hear her on the radio.

Senior figures insist they want to embrace this scrutiny.

They point out she didn’t go on TV and radio shows last Sunday, before the Budget, as has become recent infuriating tradition – where journalists ask pertinent questions about the content of the Budget and are repeatedly told to wait until Wednesday.

She will instead be appearing this Sunday, alongside the new Conservative leader elected on Saturday, no doubt.

So where might that scrutiny come? All the big stuff, for sure – the tax rises, the borrowing, the spending.

But I always like to keep an eye on the rows that may appear smaller but have the potential to blow up in a government’s face.

There is already real anger among many farmers about changes to inheritance tax which they fear will mean lots of farming families will no longer be able to pass on their life’s work and business to the next generation.

And a couple of big picture, longer-term thoughts to ponder.

This is a government with a central mission of helping to drive up economic growth.

And yet the projections for growth appear stubbornly anaemic, as our economics editor, Faisal Islam, writes.

And there is a similar observation from the Institute for Fiscal Studies, who have crunched the numbers on the forecasts for the money we are each likely to have in our pockets in the coming years, once bills are sorted – per capita disposable income, to use the language of economists.

They conclude its rate of growth, while up a smidgen on where it’s been in recent years, is still pretty piffling.

The government will hope the forecasts are wrong – and they can be.

But, as I have written before, what seems to be a huge contributor to the anti-politics mood as well as wild political volatility is that unshiftable financial reality for many: the brutal truth that things haven’t got much better, if at all better, for ages and ages and ages.

And, in the end, the persistence of that trend, or its marked end, will matter more to millions of people and the likely eventual fate of this government than plenty of the other Budget numbers being picked over right now.

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