Budget 2024: Why the post-match politics are risky for Labour
After months of speculation, Rachel Reeves has finally unveiled Labour’s first Budget in power.
Coming in the wake of 14 years in opposition, this big tax and spend – and borrow – document is very much an ideological project, with the NHS, schools and low-paid workers among the big winners.
The Chancellor may have ditched her auburn locks, but with the Budget box in hand, she was Labour’s Red Queen.
From the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) boss Rain Newton-Smith branding it a “tough Budget for business” which will “hit the ability to invest”, to the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) policy chairman Tina McKenzie warning firms of all sizes “will struggle with the rises on employer national insurance”, the score card was clear from corporations.
But when it comes to the post-match analysis, the politics of it all will also define how the Budget is seen as a win or loss in months and years to come.
Reports the Chancellor was mobbed for selfies about Westminster drinking spot The Two Chairmen last night, following a congratulatory meeting of Labour parliamentarians, suggest the government’s new head of strategic communications was, well, a strategically good hire.
Not a Budget ‘to repeat’
But Reeves has already been out on the airwaves, insisting to the BBC her fiscal decisions were to “wipe the slate clean” and “this is not the sort of Budget we would want to repeat”.
Could her reticence suggest unhappiness simmering below the surface?
Labour’s current 156-seat majority is almost double that of Boris Johnson’s 80-seat victory in 2019. Any rebellions Keir Starmer faces down the line almost certainly won’t be over the contents of a Budget box.
However, the absence of measures – or mention – of issues such as inequality or child poverty will have rankled backbenchers who face constituents for whom every penny, either off a pint or piled onto a bus fare, will have a material impact on their lives and at the ballot box.
Rather than looking behind her, however, the Chancellor spent much of yesterday’s speech staring down those directly in front of her.
Seated on the opposition benches, Tory MPs howled in indignation, as they waited for Rishi Sunak to get to his feet.
Opposition howls of fury
The former Prime Minister raged, flanked by a stony-faced Jeremy Hunt and Laura Trott, as he denounced a “spree of tax rises they promised the people of this country they would not do”.
And that anger is unlikely to heed Commons deputy speaker Nus Ghani’s repeated pleas with rowdy MPs to “simmer”.
From rural shire Tories enraged at family farming being “under attack by the government”, thanks to Reeves’ inheritance tax shake-up, to leadership contender Robert Jenrick branding her the “gloom and bust” Chancellor, and her Budget “the biggest heist in modern history”.
While fellow hopeful Kemi Badenoch sniffed: “Labour had 14 years in opposition to think about what they should do with the economy and this is what we get?”
Whoever dons the Conservative crown this weekend will certainly have much more to ask. While a petition has already been launched by CCHQ calling on Labour to scrap the ‘family farm tax’, branding it a “shameful betrayal of British farmers everywhere”.
And should Labour’s big ambitions – for higher economic growth, to attract major private investment – fail to launch, they could find themselves struggling to find an answer.