Just maybe Rachel Reeves had a cunning plan all along. Most budgets have a tendency to be moderately well received on the day, only to fall apart when the economist wonks have had a chance to go through the small print 24 hours later. Rachel has tried a rather different approach. The budget of dialectics. Her mission has been to get her budget to fall apart in the weeks and months before she delivered it. Own goal after own goal. It was a thing of Hegelian beauty. All in the hope that everything would be all right on the day and in the weeks after. She is keeping her fingers firmly crossed. Desperate measures for desperate times.
You certainly can’t fault Reeves for effort. A pre-budget shambles on this scale doesn’t happen of its own accord. It takes a lot of hard work to create this much chaos. Imagine going to the trouble of calling an early morning press conference to signal you were planning to increase income tax by 2p, only to decide against it the following week. You’ve shown you can’t be entirely trusted to keep your word while getting none of the fiscal benefits. A headless chicken is more sentient than that.
