Did you know that Jeremy Hunt and Rishi Sunak have a ‘long-term plan for growth’? It’s all very exciting. Over the long-term they are going to cut your national insurance back to zero! Yes obviously, fair’s fair, they’ll have to both put your income tax up and freeze the tax thresholds to pay for it. But still, pretty cool huh? In the long-term, of course.
The truth is that it is vanishingly unlikely that there will be much of a ‘long-term’ for either the PM or the Chancellor – given the polls and all that. But Jeremy Hunt did tell the Commons this week that he was ‘an optimist’, so it’s only natural that he should be hesitant to meekly accept the thrashing that is predicted by the data. It is that roguish spirit of hopefulness, one imagines, that also inspired him to brag about Britain’s ‘world-beating’ growth at a time when we are, technically, in an actual recession.
It’s easy to mock this week’s Budget because this week’s Budget doesn’t matter. We’re not saying it doesn’t matter that we are all poorer than we should be. Or that it doesn’t matter whether public services will get the investment they need to not collapse around us. No. But the truth is that it doesn’t matter politically – because this exhausting, fourteen-year soap opera is almost at a close.