The pressure on Rachel Reeves that has been “building all year” culminated yesterday in her much-anticipated autumn Budget, said Ailbhe Rea in The New Statesman. The chancellor stepped up to the despatch box with her “political fate” tied to Keir Starmer’s: “they went into it together, fighting for their political lives”.
The “extraordinary spectacle” of the Office for Budget Responsibility accidentally publishing details of the Budget before Reeves announced them “simply added to the already heightened sense of Labour having a bumpy ride”, said City A.M.
‘Narrow interests’
The Budget itself was “Labour to the core”, said City A.M. From scrapping the two-child benefit cap to raising the minimum wage, the announcements were “very much in line with the party’s history of combatting poverty” – and Labour MPs “seemed to love it”.
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However, there is a “gulf between the relatively narrow interests of 405 Labour MPs and voters more broadly”, said The Times. To pay for welfare, the NHS and higher wages for low earners, Reeves is bringing in “more than a dozen tax rises on workers, pensioners and savers” that will be felt just as Labour is gearing up for the next election.
She “clearly hopes” the economy will have improved by then, and she can potentially scrap planned income tax freezes or offer other incentives to the public. But if “global uncertainty continues to weigh on the UK economy”, there is a risk that Labour will go into the next election with many voters “feeling poorer than ever”.
‘Scandinavian’ tax levels
The chancellor is “trapped by the same problems that plagued her predecessors”, said UnHerd. Improving public services requires “significant tax rises” that are “the quick route to political death“. But “letting services continue to atrophy is the slow one”. Reeves and Starmer may have “bought off their most immediate opposition” by “pleasing the parliamentary party” but the unpopularity of the announcements outside of Westminster “could still cost them”. This “timid” Budget risks falling into “the regular trap of indecision: half-measures that please no one”.
It was billed as the “smorgasbord” Budget, and it will “certainly” bring Britain closer to “Scandinavian levels of taxation”, said the Financial Times. This may well be Reeves’ “last Budget as chancellor” but “if all else fails, there should be an opening in the OBR’s IT department”.
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