Keir Starmer has branded Jeremy Hunt's budget "the last desperate act of a party that has failed" and accused the Tories of "giving with one hand and taking even more with the other".
Responding to the Spring Budget, in which the chancellor announced a 2p cut to National Insurance contributions, the Labour leader said the government was leaving "Britain in recession", with the "national credit card maxed out" and the "highest tax burden for 70 years".
But Hunt also adopted two key Labour policies to help fund the NI cut – scrapping the 'non-dom' tax status and extending the windfall tax on oil and gas companies – that Starmer had hoped would go towards his spending commitments ahead of the next general election, which is expected this year.
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Starmer issued a "withering" response to Hunt's abolition of the 'non-dom' tax regime, said the Financial Times. He told the Commons yesterday that the chancellor's "desperate" decision to "finally accept Labour's argument" on the issue showed the government was "totally bereft of ideas".
But Hunt's move creates a "headache" for Starmer and his party. Labour had allocated the £2 billion it said the plan would raise to NHS reform and primary school breakfast clubs. Hunt also "borrowed from the Labour playbook" by extending the windfall tax on oil and gas companies by a year. Labour had planned to extend the tax by a year and restructure it to raise funding for its green prosperity plan. "The main opposition party must now explain how it will pay for these policies if it wins the election expected this year," said the paper.
Hunt's budget, full of voter-friendly tax cuts, was "carefully designed to woo floating voters at this year's general election", said Esther Webber on Politico. But the longer term impact of the spending plans on Britain's creaking public finances and services is "less clear". And Hunt's attempts to balance the books have required "baking in cuts to public service budgets" beyond March 2025.
Of course, Treasury ministers have "always looked for ways to hobble their successors – especially in the run-up to an election", said Webber. "But trying to paint Labour into a corner is not without downsides." There is a "real-world risk to the public sector", and whoever wins the election may "only partially be able to meet the demands of creaking services across multiple fronts".
Labour will fear that this week's "scorched earth budget" means the party "could be taking on a poisoned chalice – and one which may reduce its chances of spending more than a single term in office".
What next?
Despite the criticism that Labour has levelled at the budget, the party said it supported the 2p cut to National Insurance and the fuel duty freeze announced by Hunt.
Speaking to BBC Radio 4's "Today", shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves said that Labour now plans to fund its plans through savings to future government spending, rather than through a tax rise.
"We will go through every pound spent, every tax raised, and make sure we can continue to fund those commitments," she told the programme, emphasising that the party's election manifesto would be "fully costed and fully funded".
But Reeves offered few further details, saying that her party would need to go through government plans in an "orderly way" before committing to new spending pledges.
