A UK Parliament photograph shows Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt making an autumn budget statement in the House of Commons
(Picture: UK PARLIAMENT/AFP via Getty Imag)We’ve always known that politicians promise too much and deliver too little. But the gap between promises and delivery is a lot wider than it once was. It’s not so much that politicians have become more foolish over time (although, in some cases, that might well be true). It’s that living standards are not rising like they once were. That means slower growth in tax revenues, bigger constraints on public spending and, all too frequently, a lurch back into painful austerity.
It’s another way of saying Jeremy Hunt’s hairshirt Autumn Statement has been many years in the making. Consider the pace at which per capita incomes have risen over time. Between the Sixties and the Nineties, the average gain per decade was around 24 per cent. Thereafter, however, economic progress has been thoroughly disappointing: an income gain of only eight per cent in the Noughties and a mere six per cent in the 10 years ending in 2021.
