The clearest possible vision of the core battle in British politics over the next two years came into view the moment chancellor Jeremy Hunt finished speaking, and shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves began her reply.
Hunt had spent just under an hour as the embodiment of fiscal prudence, stability and compassion. He was authorititive and balanced, with only two or three moments of the sort of deliberate grandstanding that used to occur every five minutes with George Osborne. He pointed to international factors: the war in Ukraine, the continuing legacy of covid. He offered figures that suggested the UK was doing better than some, worse than others.
But Reeves’ reply told us just how combative politics is going to be from here on into the next general election. For Reeves, there were two key points: 12 years of Tory government and 13 weeks of mini-budget chaos combined to crash the UK economy. ‘Working people footing the bill for Conservative incompetence.’
The battle lines are drawn. The government will deploy every figure to suggest things are improving under their thoughtful care, and try desperately to avoid discussion of their own role in current economic difficulties. Labour will bash away with the rather simpler message that it’s all the fault of the government.
But in its turn, it will try to avoid answering its own killer question: ‘what would you do that’s different?’
Strangely, though Hunt had promised us ‘eye watering’ choices, it all felt rather managerial and quite positive.
That’s because the real pain is off-piste – allowances frozen, increases scheduled in to the middle distance and, as Reeves pointed out, massive increases in council tax for which the local authorities will cop the blame.
Make no mistake: the next 18 months will be grim. The past 30 years have been an interlude of relative growth punctuated by the financial crisis, which everyone could blame on city slickers. Now we are back to politics as it used to be in the 80s and 90s.
There’s a good reason for that: despite the brilliance of Blair, the niceness of Major, and the smoothness of Cameron, the UK economy isn’t fixed.
The central questions for the British people are going to be: who do you blame? And who do you trust to put it right? That debate just started in earnest.
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