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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » Hammond’s budget: the tabloids react
My guess is that the Tories will not be too unhappy about the coverage of the budget. Mostly the papers are positive or neutral and he has managed to avoid horrors of the past like George Osborne’s pasty tax.
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If £46k per year puts you in the top 14% of earners, then that sounds like being of limited electoral benefit. However, those earning that sort of money are likely to vote. I also reckon they might be more likely to live in marginals in London and Southern England.
It seems strange to think that the battle ground is richer people, but that's what happened in 2017. Counter-intuitively, I reckon these people are quite attracted to Jeremy Corbyn.
Heck, Brown's most infamous Budget (10p tax) took a whole year before it unravelled in chaos and a big rise in borrowing.
That said, I have always rated Hammond.
He reminds me of Alistair Darling and John Reid in Blair's cabinets.
You could always rely on them.
I was pondering in light of Yorkcity's comments whether the real economic risk to the Tories would be a savage spike in interest rates, which is not only long overdue but will soon become necessary to get savings rates up. But do they actually get many people with substantial mortgages to vote for them anyway now?
Osborne at least had the grace to u-turn rapidly.
I don't think history will judge Darling necessarily kindly, but it will I think be kinder to him than to Brown or Lamont.
(And his memoirs are brilliant. I especially enjoyed the moment when he said Fred the Shred should have accepted £350k pension, as 'most people could have struggled by on that.')
You can see the optics collapse between the headline and the second paragraph.
I know there's been commentary here on sweeteners ahead of a potential General Election. Heard from someone (not an insider, I hasten to add) that he reckoned it might be sweeteners ahead of a second referendum.
Labour are just an embarrassment at the moment.
An unexpected rise in the UK tax burden — now on course to hit its highest level since 1986-87
https://www.ft.com/content/a5569cca-db7c-11e8-8f50-cbae5495d92b
'For every problem there is a solution that is simple, easily understood and wrong:' H L Mencken.
Any fule can give money away - very little innovation in this budget - just tinkering.
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/jeremy-corbyn-budget-reply-austerity-labour-a8606556.html
(Edited for embarrassing Freudian slip on Rentoul's name.)
I suppose the shouty delivery was just Jeremy being Jeremy.
Not saying it's an easy gig to respond to the budget because it clearly isn't, but my Year 12s could have done a better job than that at unpicking an opponent's comments.
Not sure about Corbyn’s team
As a means to spunk around lots of spending on schools and hospitals that you don’t need to account for in the public finances whatever the cost, less so.
But it's worth remembering in its first incarnation it was a Tory idea.
Mind you, that was his fault for all those comments about Labour that he made. Very political.
At least I assume that's the reasoning and it's not a reckless bung to the electorate in preparation for an emergency election.
The Chief Secretary to the Treasury claimed on R4 yesterday afternoon that we were starting to pay down the National Debt, but there's no surplus on the budget forecasts as far as they go. Sadly the BBC presenter wasn't able to challenge. You would think that after ten years of deficit political economy we would all have a good grasp on this.
This is why a person like Trump is able to prosper in a modern Western democracy. Our standards are so low that we are incapable of establishing basic facts to form the foundation of reality-based debate. The public should know that the government proposes to continue to borrow money, and increase the size of the national debt, for the next five years, but no-one will tell them.
Hmm. It’s almost as if a government is now trying to fund services out of taxes, not taxes and borrowing.
As a non-economist, I always liken the deficit to forward motion and the debt as distance travelled for an ocean liner. You have to slow down before you can stop and reverse track. Simplistic, but beyond the wit of some Labour politicians.
Economics isn't really a scientific discipline, but the spending more to reduce your debt theme is nonsense to most people. It's nice to spend lots to make people better off, but that's different to investment with a guaranteed return. Life is what it is.
I'd probably go back to voting LD if they lived up to their Democratic tag. You can vote yes or no, but if you vote no, we'll keep re-running it until you do what we say.
"Teachers and parents have reacted with anger to an announcement in the Budget that schools are to receive a one-off payment of £400m for "little extras"."
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-46028757
So if you are working you have that offset against you unless of course you are a pensioner on this level of income and so don't pay NI!
So what are we actually meant to spend it on?
I can't help but feel it's better to give nothing than too little. That way you don't have to deal with an expectations gap as well.
Nothing extra would have more likely to have got them less upset.
https://www.insee.fr/en/statistiques/3639195
By comparison in the UK it was 3% higher.
Now imagine that these numbers were reversed with consumer spending up 3% in France and down 1.5% in the UK.
Would the consequent apocalyptic reporting be blaming Brexit or austerity or both ?
There were also too many fires needing put out where public services are facing a real crisis. The extra money for schools is not enough to make a difference and very much a one off, not built into the budget for later years. The pot hole payments covers approximately 1/20th of the backlog. The additional money for Social Care will not stop Councils facing a financial crisis. The £1bn extra for defence in these circumstances seemed slightly eccentric and must surely have been to buy some votes for something.
This is not to say for a moment that the budget should have been some Corbynite bonanza. It simply reflects the fact that the calls upon the public budget are more than the government can hope to meet, especially after the massive allocation towards Health. In light of that the tax cuts were something of a surprise even if they were counterbalanced by increases elsewhere.
The reality to me is that we have a Tory government committed to spending all of the proceeds of growth rather than sharing them. Deficit reduction is no longer a priority, let alone reducing government debt. Any tax cuts are counterbalanced by increases plus just a little bit more. We are committed to real terms increases in public spending of 1.4% a year and we can add annual goodies from the Chancellor on top of that. I can't help feeling the likes of Ed Miliband would have been pretty comfortable with such an approach, even if Labour have moved further left since then.
https://www.tes.com/news/budget-2018-ps400m-help-schools-buy-little-extras (Requires registration or a Google account).
(That said Lucy 'in the real world' Powell has a nerve to accuse anyone else of being patronising.)
Mr. Rentool, if they're angry, I would like to advert that I am willing to accept the £400m for little extras, and will express nothing but delight and gratitude.
Aren’t you being a little harsh?
Bit tricky. I wonder if Leclerc (whose 8.5 is notably longer than the 6.5 available in the specials) and Gasly (26) might be value each way, fifth the odds, top 3.
Hmm. Mercedes will likely have an overt number one status for Hamilton. Ferrari might be in more of a pickle. Vettel's made some mistakes this year (the team has too, to be fair), and Leclerc's fast and clearly has a potentially long and successful future ahead of him.
At Red Bull, Gasly will do very well to hold onto Verstappen's coat tails. But Verstappen is 4.5 against 26 for Gasly. To rephrase, Verstappen is almost the same odds win the title as Gasly is to be top 3.
Plenty of time, so I'm leaving this for now. But next time I log in with an eye to betting, I'll see how the odds look with boost.
That is, when last I checked, more than 52%.
Why doesn't he use the percentages?
(If you think I'm being harsh, try getting a 1.3% error passed your auditors.)
"Deficit reduction is no longer a priority,"
Labour did well with last time with a spend, spend, spend manifesto. Very well, considering they had Old Bonehead in charge.
The Tories have got a death wish sticking with May but replacing her with Hammond would make it even worse.
After 8 years of austerity Hammond could not ignore that message
https://mobile.twitter.com/ShippersUnbound/status/1057175953506480128
Would it have been possible for Hammond to have drastically raised the personal allowance (14k? 15k?) instead of raising the higher rate to 50k? Thus taking a huge swathe of the poorest paid out of paying tax entirely while still giving eveyone a tax cut (after all, people on 50k get their first 14k free, too).
I know there is an argument that everybody should contribute to society, but it's always struck me as a good thing to take the poorest in society out of tax to reduce the politics of envy - demonstrating how rich people literally take on the lion's share of the tax burden?
It really is the wrong priority to favour wealthy pensioners unless you are preparing for a GE.
No wonder they went with falsely accusing Tories of being paedophiles by the fourth year of opposition.
Hammond abdicated responsibility in this budget rather than assumed it.
All three are Jewish. Go figure.
Wiedersehen.
If you are a public sector worker or on benefits and strongly anti austerity you are likely to have voted Labour in 2015 and 2017 anyway