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The Guardian is reporting that the OBR delivered a better than expected fiscal forecast which put the fiscal hole at 20 billion pounds .

Uk govt spending per year is £1.3tn.

If you ask the OBR at three different points of the year to estimate the fiscal hole, you might well get answers of 20, 40, 60bn. 20bn is close to a rounding error in our spending.

We need to stop making radically different plans based on their estimate which is another term for educated and calculated guess.

The reason for this is that we've promised the bond markets that we have a plan to balance the budget in five years time, and it's on the basis of this promise that they are relatively sanguine about lending us vast sums of money. This means that our fiscal reputation is reliant on financial forecasts, which will fluctuate and are imprecise. This is not a problem if we have a safety margin - the forecasts can fluctuate within the safety margin and the plans do not need to radically change. We do not have a safety margin.

There are two alternatives. Establish fiscal responsibility by cutting the budget deficit in reality, rather than on paper, in the future. Or re-establish the safety margin in the plans, so that fluctuations in the forecast can be ignored. Both of these alternatives involve making more spending cuts, or tax increases, than the status quo.

That's why we are where we are.

EDIT: If we simply decide to ignore the OBR, then Britain loses its fiscal credibility and is forced into cutting the budget deficit rather quickly.

We haven't promised to balance our budget in 5 years (now 4 technically). What we have promised is that at that point the deficit will be falling as a share of GDP which is by no means the same thing. What the OBR are supposed to be doing is measuring our progress towards that Nirvana and it is pointing out we are not on track.

And it will have to keep pointing this out because our underlying fiscal situation is deteriorating, not improving. We have absolutely minimal growth, a very large deficit, a serious increase in the cost of our debt mountain (not entirely sure I mountain quite covers it anymore) and pressure on the defence budget. Even worse we have a government that refuses to recognise all of this and who will try to find spending cuts to even offset these pressures.

Re Labour’s ‘Ming Vase’ strategy; it worked up to a point, they won a huge majority, but it didn’t get them any new votes. Amidst the relief that Starmer and the grown ups were back in charge, too many people glossed over the fact that they actually lost votes. LOST VOTES when the previous government had completely disgraced itself, morally with partygate, and economically with the Truss mini budget.

Of course, a critic of Starmer couldn’t have been taken seriously if they criticised him for not winning a huge majority well enough, but the huge majority was a kind of illusion; they didn’t really win by much.

Was there any need for the ming vase strategy? They had an open goal anyway, they could have done what they wanted. As it is, the victory margins were often so shallow that it’s left the govt too scared to do anything, despite being gifted an amount of power far in excess of what the underlying numbers say they deserved

I’d compare it a football team winning the league with 60 points. Most seasons that would be failure, but if all the other sides fail worse, you’re left as Champions and in the UCL. The right thing to do is surely to acknowledge your luck, then double down by absolutely going for it in the transfer window with the money you’ve gained. Instead, Starmer has decided it wasn’t luck, that they were popular, and the triangulation should continue

All true, but two quibbles:
1) Theresa May had an open goal in 2017 and thought she'd - laudably, in my view - use it to come up with a solution to funding adult social care, and look where that got her. Meanwhile, it was a strategy nit so very removed from Ming Vase which led to the 1997 landslide. While I agree with your point I can understand Labour's reticence.
2) One of my many, many gripes with football is the way you can just buy someone else's players. That's not sport, surely? "We won the league!" "What do you put that down to?" "We bought all the other clubs' best players." It's not really 'we', then, is it? People in football seem so firmly embedded in this culture that they don't appear to see the absurdity of this.
When Nottingham Forest won the league, they may have aquired a handful, but half the team were those who'd been playing in Division 2 the previous year.
I appreciate this is incidental to your point.

Yeah, I agree on your second point. It bothers me when Arsenal sign a load of players as I want to win with those I’ve come to regard as ‘ours’. But I soon get over it to be fair

I can also see why Labour did what they did. If they’d been bolder and lost, people would have slaughtered them, but reality has shown that the grass isn’t always greener. Had they been bold and lost they’d have ruminated about how a large majority won by a ming vase approach would have given licence to radically change the country, but it’s not been the case

Labour, promising tax increases, would still have won 340-350 seats, I’m sure.

I know 'courageous' has become a synonym for out there policies but every successful politician needs a modicum of that quality. From breaking pre-GE promises then not even having the balls to own those broken promises to triumphantly whipping out a royal invite to Daddy Trump, from adopting Reform-lite rhetoric to refusing to grasp the tax nettle, the defining aspect of Starmerism is lack of courage. Their political epitaph will be 'Gutless'.

Not only did the Ukrainians hit the oil terminal in Novorossiysk (the explosion there was massive), and air defences there, but they also hit the Saratov oil refinery again and a fuel depot near the Engels airbase.

Meanwhile the Russians hit nearly a dozen apartment blocks in Kyiv.

Russia must lose and be seen to lose.

Yes, the contrast between the targets of the two sides was quite stark yesterday.

On the front lines the action is in the town of Pokrovsk, with the Russians sending tens of thousands of men there in the last few days, most of whom meet an unfortunate fate.

FPT:
Oil pipeline terminal in Novorossiysk, with a bit of a smoking problem.

https://x.com/tendar/status/1989110149127238095
https://x.com/jayinkyiv/status/1989196881931694280
https://x.com/bohuslavskakate/status/1989121637367836967

Also a military facility in the same city, probably air defences and ammunition.

https://x.com/osinttechnical/status/1989146396256334302
https://x.com/tendar/status/1989124320598073606

The Russians, meanwhile, well they’re bombing apartment blocks in Kyiv.

https://x.com/bohuslavskakate/status/1989122025143824804

Russia has fought a very stupid war.

Three and a half years after Operation Barbarossa started, the Red Army was closing on Berlin.

Three and a half years after the SMO began, Russia has advanced 20 miles into the Donbass.

Our government seems to be conducting budget negotiations via opinion polls.
The absolute antithesis of leadership.

Starmer and Reeves ditch Budget plan to increase income tax rates
https://x.com/FT/status/1989100368467272006

But if you’re lowering the thresholds at which people start paying (as is mooted by some articles), that’s still an income tax rise. They’re just presenting it as non manifesto breaching because it doesn’t affect the rate (nobody will be impressed with that justification but that’s what they’re going for presumably). That said, surely they won’t cut the personal allowance?

I do fear we’re back to the drawing board of lots of weird taxes around the edges of everything. This won’t collect the money she expects, and I am not convinced the markets will buy it.

Window tax likely to make a comeback?

Maybe a giant holibobs tax.

Huge taxes on cats and dogs. Mahoosive on horses.

Fishing rod tax. Enormous taxes on having a garden.

I'm sure they will have thought of some more creative ways to piss off the voters by Budget Day.

Their focus group polling on raising income tax must have been terrifying. Something they can't remotely recover from in this term. But they aren't smart enough to find a way round it to raise the funding they need.

They really are making it up as they go along. Government by opinion poll and newspaper reactions to kite-flying.

Fun to watch from a distance, but people are making real-world decisions based on the rumours - many of whom will be joining myself in expatville in the near future, at great detriment to the government’s finances.

It's absurd that politicians have trapped themselves into a world where the principal tax rates can never be increased. The whole logic of a tax rate is that the tax is broadly based , and the headline rate goes up or down according to policy and the state of national finances, so that the cost of increases (or the benefit of reductions) is appropriately and widely spread.

That 'politics' apparently prevents flexing the rates of the broadly-based taxes and hence the government needs to gather up a whole load of 'special' tax changes focused on a whole series of minority interests is sub-optimal both for national governance and - almost certainly - in terms of its political impact, as those groups singled out to pay more will surely howl in protest.

The politicians who have trapped themselves here are Starmer and Reeves.

They were stupid to give the pledge in the way it was in the first instance, they were stupid to double down on it when they got into power (focussing instead on WFA), they were stupid to raise employers NI and claim no technical breach, and they were stupid not to leave themselves enough headroom so that they’ve got more problems to fix in their second budget when their political power is weaker.

Textbook on how not to run a government.

Our government seems to be conducting budget negotiations via opinion polls.
The absolute antithesis of leadership.

Starmer and Reeves ditch Budget plan to increase income tax rates
https://x.com/FT/status/1989100368467272006

But if you’re lowering the thresholds at which people start paying (as is mooted by some articles), that’s still an income tax rise. They’re just presenting it as non manifesto breaching because it doesn’t affect the rate (nobody will be impressed with that justification but that’s what they’re going for presumably). That said, surely they won’t cut the personal allowance?

I do fear we’re back to the drawing board of lots of weird taxes around the edges of everything. This won’t collect the money she expects, and I am not convinced the markets will buy it.

Window tax likely to make a comeback?

Maybe a giant holibobs tax.

Huge taxes on cats and dogs. Mahoosive on horses.

Fishing rod tax. Enormous taxes on having a garden.

I'm sure they will have thought of some more creative ways to piss off the voters by Budget Day.

Their focus group polling on raising income tax must have been terrifying. Something they can't remotely recover from in this term. But they aren't smart enough to find a way round it to raise the funding they need.

They really are making it up as they go along. Government by opinion poll and newspaper reactions to kite-flying.

Fun to watch from a distance, but people are making real-world decisions based on the rumours - many of whom will be joining myself in expatville in the near future, at great detriment to the government’s finances.

It's absurd that politicians have trapped themselves into a world where the principal tax rates can never be increased. The whole logic of a tax rate is that the tax is broadly based , and the headline rate goes up or down according to policy and the state of national finances, so that the cost of increases (or the benefit of reductions) is appropriately and widely spread.

That 'politics' apparently prevents flexing the rates of the broadly-based taxes and hence the government needs to gather up a whole load of 'special' tax changes focused on a whole series of minority interests is sub-optimal both for national governance and - almost certainly - in terms of its political impact, as those groups singled out to pay more will surely howl in protest.

After droning on about doing the right thing for the country v the politically expedient thing it looks like it will be the latter .

If Reeves and Starmer were so worried about the political damage breaking a manifesto commitment would be then they should have not suggested they were going to do that . Now it just looks like they’re flailing around without a clue and will instead raise a range of other taxes and then hope for the best .

Messing around with thresholds looks like a sleight of hand . I’ve never known a budget where so many kites have been flown .

Labour backbenchers are living in cloud cuckoo land now being marshalled by Powell who will just say anything to ingratiate herself with them and the general public hoping to be in the right place if Starmer goes .

Unless Starmer and Reeves are incredibly lucky then this all looks like ending in tears . Where exactly is growth going to come from ?

People who don’t want a Reform government like myself just look on in horror .

If you have a majority of 170 you should carry out the policies you believe in. I can't believe they've caved in.

The trouble is that they have a sinking feeling, common amongst the even-slightly-reallistic left since the collapse of the Cold War, that the policies they believe in with their hearts, don't actually work and in fact make most things much worse. While there is no support in their party for policies that do work.

So they are left with either shameless, dishonest centrist opportunism, a la Blair, or technocratic managerialism, as Starmer has tried and failed dismally. Neither really work when you don't have a golden Thatcherite economic legacy to squander.

It was obvious that the Starmer government would end up this way, but I've been very surprised by the size and speed of the collapse.

The Labour business model is broken. It piles too much support for the public sector onto the shoulders of the private sector and then onto the voters.

What “works”, and has what worked as long as I can remember, is liberal democracy, combined with well regulated capital markets, consumer protection, a social safety net, respect for human rights and civil liberties, government support and investment in areas of potential market failure like healthcare, transportation and education, and the rule of law.

That’s not a left or right thing. It’s a civilisation thing.

And what has broken down is the loss of a sense of community; of being part of a larger whole. It’s rent maximisation from property owners; pensioners resisting any cuts; campaigners always demanding more spending on their pet projects. The WASPI women are a good example. Yes the administration was flawed. No that doesn’t mean you get billions in compensation

No one recognises that the whole has got to work for everyone anymore