Hollywood adores a franchise. The 10 highest-grossing movies of 2022 were all either sequels or reboots and the reason is pretty obvious: return on investment.
The average original picture, i.e. one not built off pre-existing intellectual property, has made 2.8 times its budget back at the global box office since 1980, according to Walt Hickey, the author of You Are What You Watch. That's impressive, but the average sequel has made 4.2 times its budget.
Jeremy Hunt was intending that the Budget, set for a week from today, would be the sequel to November's Autumn Statement. You may recall (the chancellor certainly hopes you do) that he announced a 2p cut to national insurance, the 'full expensing' of capital allowances and the extension of the 75 per cent business rates relief for eligible businesses. The message was clear: this is a Tax-Cutting Government (so long as you ignore all the previous tax rises).
To fund these goodies, Hunt spent his precious (and as ever, largely theoretical) fiscal headroom. That is, the amount of money the chancellor has to spend without breaking his own fiscal rules, in this case, that debt as a share of GDP is falling in five years' time.
Plans were afoot for more of the same. Perhaps he could cut another penny off national insurance (cost: ~£5bn) or income tax (~£7bn) or even scrap inheritance tax (~£8bn). Unfortunately, those deep-state, Economist-reading, anti-growth killjoys at the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) have gotten in the way.
One must always be wary of expectations management, but the OBR's forecasts appear to have deteriorated. The figure being bandied about is that Hunt has roughly £15bn of fiscal headroom to play with. Of course, he cannot spend it all, given that chancellors – even months before an election – must hold something back for the proverbial rainy day.
One alternative is to backload ever more unrealistic (translation: politically impossible) spending cuts for after the election. Yet current spending plans already require substantial cuts to unprotected departments, and any more would only fuel accusations of a return to austerity.
The fact is that, whoever wins the next election, will inherit three unpleasant realities:
First, the tax burden will be at its highest level since the end of the Second World War, according to analysis from the Institute for Fiscal Studies. Second, large swathes of the public realm (NHS, courts, local government etc) are already on its knees (according to the Institute for Government's Performance Tracker as well as anyone who's interacted with the state recently). And third, demographic change (you are getting older) will only make these trends more exaggerated.
Of course, you're unlikely to hear any of this in the Budget statement on Wednesday or even during the general election campaign. These people are trying to win an election, for goodness sake, not land a job at a think tank.
