Polly Toynbee: ‘These Tories forget nothing and learn nothing’
No contrition. Not for Liz Truss, not for their self-harming Brexit deal, nor for 12 years of going backwards. Recession, eight years of growth wiped out, rising unemployment, falling wages: all this is confirmed by the Office for Budget Responsibility today. But these Tory Bourbons forget nothing and learn nothing.
There’s no remorse for George Osborne’s austerity that stripped the country bare and wiped 1% off GDP. Instead, here comes the austerity reprise, but far worse now that the Tories are cutting spending on skeleton services in a state of collapse. The usual flurry of spending announcements can’t blot out the warning of Rob Whiteman, the head of the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy. He says: “Public services are going to need increases of about 20% just to stand still, and we are not going to see anything like that.” More for the NHS and social care doesn’t begin to compensate for years of their worst funding ever. The NHS spends 20% less per person than 14 similar EU countries, the Health Foundation reveals today. There’s no chance of reducing the waiting lists, the National Audit Office warns. Even Tory home counties council leaders are finally breaking their silence to warn they will go bankrupt.
“Eye-wateringly difficult,” said Jeremy Hunt, but whose eyes are watering most? “To be British is to be compassionate,” the chancellor claimed at his most unctuous. True, he hasn’t cut benefits yet again, but his government slashed them in seven of the last 10 years to the lowest among similar countries, as millions of children go hungry to school.
Look where Tory “choices” have left us, with the worst wage growth in 200 years and one in five key workers earning so little they bring up their children in poverty. Meanwhile shareholders had a bonanza and bankers’ bonuses doubled. Covid and the war in Ukraine don’t explain why Britain faces the lowest growth in the G20 – bar Russia.
An extraordinary poll today suggests the public will neither forgive nor forget. With things so hard for so many, Ipsos found a third of those interviewed expected the autumn statement to make things worse, a third expected they would be no better, and only 22% expected improvement.
The sheer effrontery of Hunt’s claim that “Conservatives do not leave our debts to the next generation” is breathtaking. No, he leaves it to Labour after the next election, a callow political trick. We wait for Labour’s policy responses: tax rises in this under-taxed country can only help Labour’s future, while spending cuts are unthinkable.
Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
Katy Balls: ‘Copying Blairism will only aggravate MPs on the right’
When Kwasi Kwarteng unveiled his not-so-mini-budget, Tory MPs quickly saw red over his and Liz Truss’s headline move: to cut the top rate of tax. As Michael Gove put it in an interview in the weeks afterwards: “That is a display of the wrong values.”
This autumn statement is intended to say the opposite. The Truss era of “libertarian jihadists” – as one Tory MP, now a minister, labelled them – is over and, under Rishi Sunak, the party is trying to move to the centre ground.
Not only has tax been raised for high earners, with people to start paying the 45p rate at £125,000 rather than £150,000, Hunt was quick to emphasise spending increases for the NHS and schools as well as a rise in the “national living wage” and benefits going up in line with inflation.
The attempt by the Tories to park their tanks on Labour lawns isn’t exactly subtle – with announcements that the former Labour health secretary Patricia Hewitt will advise on integrating health and social care and Tony Blair’s delivery chief Michael Barber will help with the skills agenda.
However, no Labour hires can dress up the dismal economic outlook. For all the talk of helping the most vulnerable, the Office for Budget Responsibility forecasts that living standards will fall 7% over the next two years – wiping out all growth from the previous eight years. Already the Liberal Democrats are preparing to go on the attack over the squeezed middle.
Even if Sunak can convince the public that these are the best steps given the circumstances, the harder audience could be the one right in front of him: Tory MPs. The tax rises and enhanced windfall tax go against the instincts of many. The idea of copying a form of Blairism, too, will only aggravate MPs on the right of the party further.
When Sunak became prime minister, the party made an uneasy truce to rally behind him in a bid to end the psychodrama of the past few months. As he put it to MPs in his first private address to them: unite or die. We’re about to find out which option the Tory parliamentary party is going to choose.
Katy Balls is the Spectator’s deputy political editor
Miatta Fahnbulleh: ‘The chancellor prioritised fixing a fiscal crisis that does not exist’
We are facing one of the deepest and longest recessions in 100 years at the same time as millions are being squeezed by soaring prices. Real household incomes are set to fall by 7% over the next two years, the biggest fall on record. Cushioning people from this double hammer blow should have been the chancellor’s No 1 priority. Instead, he prioritised fixing a fiscal crisis that does not exist.
The extension of the energy price guarantee, increase in the living wage and uprating of benefits and pensions in line with inflation are welcome. They will take the sting away, but won’t be enough to insulate millions who are already struggling to afford everyday essentials. And for public services facing £43bn of cuts a year due to inflation, the failure to plug this gap will push our schools, hospitals and local services further into crisis. He could have reversed the outstanding tax cuts in the mini-budget, closed the non-dom tax loophole, and equalised wealth taxes with income taxes to do this, but he chose not to. The wrong political choice.
With a painful recession looming, Hunt missed the opportunity to give the economy a £30bn-a-year green investment boost that would have allowed us to retrofit millions of homes, deliver a clean energy system that we own, upgrade public transport and build the infrastructure we need for the future. Reviving our economy in the short term and building our resilience for the long term.
We have had 12 years of Conservative party making the wrong choices for the economy. We are weaker and poorer as a result. It seems the chancellor has learned nothing from this – and we will all pay the price.
Miatta Fahnbulleh is an economist. She is standing to be Labour’s parliamentary candidate in Camberwell & Peckham
Rachel Clarke: ‘This doesn’t even cover half the NHS budget shortfall’
It’s the weasel words that are hardest to swallow: Hunt’s pretence that failing to address the NHS’s real-terms, multibillion-pound funding cuts is in any way compatible with slowing the collapse of the NHS, let alone reversing it. Thanks to inflation, the NHS is already facing a £7bn shortfall in its budget this year. Today’s announcement of an extra £3.3bn of NHS funding doesn’t even cover half of that. We are, in other words, still facing de facto budget cuts – at a time when the scale of avoidable deaths and patient suffering has never been more indefensible.
Worse was that the chancellor couldn’t resist in indulging in some not-so-subtle NHS bashing, presumably as a sop to his party’s libertarian wing. “I’m asking the NHS to join all public services to tackle waste and inefficiency. We want Scandinavian quality alongside Singaporean efficiency,” he said, suggesting the NHS is somehow uniquely at fault. Yet as the country’s longest-serving former health secretary, he knows full well how brutally the NHS has been pared to the bone – and how forcing us to run on empty makes it only harder to streamline services.
Let’s be blunt. If the government was truly committed to “putting the NHS first”, as Hunt has claimed today, it would provide the financial support necessary to genuinely drive down waiting lists and stop patients dying in corridors, in stranded ambulances and in abject misery, over and over again. Hunt likes to insist he is a patient safety champion, but this budget is an exercise in managing optics, not reality.
Rachel Clarke is a palliative care doctor and the author of Breathtaking: Inside the NHS in a Time of Pandemic
Tessa Khan: ‘The chancellor has sided with the oil and gas industry’
The chancellor rightly diagnosed climate breakdown and energy affordability as two of the biggest challenges we face, but has sided today with the industry driving both: oil and gas. Until this year, the UK offered among the most lucrative tax conditions for oil and gas producers in the world. The rise in the rate of the windfall tax to 35% is therefore welcome, but it is a temporary fix when what is needed is permanent reform.
More alarmingly, Hunt has failed to close the gaping tax loophole that allows companies such as Shell to avoid tax if they invest in new oil and gas fields. It also gives them an even bigger handout if they choose to power their oil and gas rigs using wind – despite the fact that the vast majority of emissions come from burning, not extracting, oil. Not only will this see billions in lost tax, it sends us in precisely the opposite direction to the one that will get us out of this hole for good. This is the “highway to climate hell”, that the UN secretary general, António Guterres, warned world leaders about at Cop27. It is also the route to permanently high energy bills.
Electricity generators have also been hit with a 45% windfall tax but without the generous allowance for new investment that oil and gas companies benefit from. This is an absurd outcome given the dual crises we face of climate breakdown and energy affordability.
Tessa Khan is executive director of climate action organisation Uplift
Frances Ryan: ‘The public will pay for the Tories’ failures’
Hunt pulled out some rabbits – extra social care, schools and NHS funding, and capping social rent rises – but it couldn’t distract from the grim news: public spending on already crumbling services will be gutted in the long term.
This statement was a lesson in kicking the can down the road. Delaying the social care cap. Delaying major cuts until after the next election. Those who rely on the state pension or benefits must get through a cold winter before the 10% rise in payments arrives next year.
It was all everyone else’s fault, though. Euphemisms of “efficiencies” and “difficult decisions” suggest such public funding cuts are reasonable and necessary, even noble. “Global forces” give the impression every major economy is in this position.
But it cannot be forgotten: we are largely in this position because of the fallout of Truss’s calamitous mini-budget. The Resolution Foundation calculates that the Truss government cost the country £30bn – doubling the sum that the Treasury has had to raise. Not to mention the impact of Brexit.
The public is still reeling from the last decade of cuts: struggling to get a GP appointment, languishing on social care waiting lists or taking children to a rundown local park. Twelve years of Tory failure have ratcheted up a staggering bill. But it is the British public who will pay – in more ways than one.
Frances Ryan is a Guardian columnist
• This article was amended on 17 November 2022. An early version mistakenly referred to Rob Whiteman, CEO of the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy, as Rob Whitehouse.
