Was this Andy Burnham’s budget – the bold vision of a new prime minister who burns with a passion to topple “40 years of neoliberalism”? Fat chance. Was it John Healey’s budget – the repair job of a cautious chancellor fretting about record-high taxes, £3tn of public debt and an economy stuck in first gear? Little sign of that.
This budget was cast in the image of a man who isn’t in Burnham’s government or even a Labour politician – but who appears almost every day on TV, on podcasts and is probably better known than 649 of the MPs at Westminster. Today’s budget was the Martin Lewis budget.
Lewis is the MoneySavingExpert, whose weekly Money Tips email advises 10 million British subscribers on cheap mortgages, Black Friday deals and how to score two pizzas for £10. Tips and tricks to stave off rising prices and make the most of the money you have. Given that the Bayeux tapestry is French, and the Koh-i-noor is Indian, Lewis may be the closest thing Britain has to a genuine national treasure.
Over the past four years, since Russia launched its full-scale war on Ukraine and sent energy prices soaring, Lewis has become more political and wielded greater influence in Westminster. His fingerprints were all over this “red book”. This morning, before the cabinet had even had its traditional pre-budget pep talk, Lewis had gone to Downing Street for a personal briefing from the chancellor on its key measures. On Radio 4’s Today programme, he was the big budget interview, rather than any politician or BBC editor.
No wonder, because the most eye-catching of the budget’s measures had been written by the money saving expert. Scrapping standing charges on gas bills, shielding more pensioners from income tax and fixing energy bill credit against council tax bands – all of these came from Lewis’s wishlist. Beyond policies, he has also informed Burnham’s politics. At last year’s Labour conference, Lewis advised any new prime minister to “pick a hundred things that piss people off and fix them at one a day for the first hundred days”. Et voilà! The King of the North has vowed to end loudcasting on public transport, crack down on unfair parking fines and introduce more drop boxes for the post … and more and more.
For Labour ministers, government by MoneySavingExpert may seem a no-brainer. After a wretched couple of years under Keir Starmer, they can pose as the people’s champion, for ever on your side. Best of all, all these micro-policies cost micro-money. Today’s budget had 98 measures – more than any I can remember in decades of covering fiscal events, yet they all cost trifling sums.
Which brings us to the killer problem: Lewis is one of the most trusted people in Britain. But he’s not a politician. He’s never claimed to be. He speaks the language of terms and conditions, not financialisation – and he knows his limits. To quote a New Statesman essay last week on the new MoneySavingPolitics: “As governments have embraced retail policies and suggestion-box-style politics in his image, Lewis has been raising the alarm that there are too many people who can no longer help themselves and it is time for structural change.”
The difference was clear today. In her first budget, Rachel Reeves announced extra spending worth £74bn by the end of the period. By comparison, Healey announced a grand total of £380m. For all Burnham’s grand ambition and soaring rhetoric, his first budget was only 0.5% of Starmer’s first budget.
This is obviously not how the King of the North wants you to see him. Listen to Burnham speak, and you hear a changemaker, an ideas man, a leader with a 10-year plan. But does he put his money where his mouth is? Does he heck. The anxiety I have heard for months from so many of his advisers and MPs was borne out in this budget: he’s big talk and small stick.
The best line of the day came from Kemi Badenoch. “The prime minister came to power promising to end 40 years of neoliberalism, and instead we got 4p off gherkins,” the Tory leader said, while Burnham and Healey frowned like men caught bang to rights. What’s the point of cut-price marmalade when a few months ago you promised to nationalise Thames Water?
Why, for that matter, chuck out the old boss when the new one is less ambitious? Whacking banks with a tax in order to cut energy costs is good politics, but this new government should have been much more ambitious. A hundred pounds is a token saving when the typical household’s fuel bill is about to top £2,000. Given how harsh this El Niño winter is likely to be, I imagine the government will have to cobble together another intervention before the new year.
Ministers are now caught in a pincer movement between Badenoch to their right, who can argue they aren’t tackling the really big problems and, to their left, the Greens and Plaid, as well as the Scottish nationalists, who will keep on saying they aren’t doing enough for their own voters. In a day of grim economic forecasts, perhaps the worst was from the Office for Budget Responsibility, which said that in the face of high inflation, earnings will not rise at all next year – while 2030 would see households with take-home pay just 2% above where it was before Covid struck in 2020. Put those two figures together and – despite all the Westminster chat – you can forget about a snap election that delivers Labour a new majority.
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If ministers can’t offer any protection against an economic outlook that bleak, they will face an angry and mutinous public. If the Labour party wants to be re-elected, it needs to give people a reason to go out and vote for it. Pointing to bond markets isn’t a defence, because markets aren’t in open rebellion. Yes, government borrowing is a lot more expensive than it was in the post-crash years of cheap money and the interest bill on the nation’s debt is high. But no one thinks Britain is France. Gilt traders today looked at a government running down its financial buffer and were completely unruffled. Had Healey borrowed much more to invest in social and cheap housing, he could have argued that such spending would soon enough bring down benefit bills – and markets would have believed him.
I write this as someone who wants Burnham to do well – and certainly to do better than today’s tiny raft of tweaks. Unlike many Labour politicians, he can talk sincerely about where disastrous rightwing politics have led this country. When he promises a new economic and political model, I – and many others – am up for it. In contrast to Starmer he doesn’t act as if he hates 80% of his own party members. Unlike Starmer’s advisers, his team doesn’t subsist on a diet of received wisdom and petty vindictiveness. But at some point, the grand rhetoric and the romantic notions need to cash out into a programme of change. Otherwise, voters will draw the conclusion that this summer’s coup against a recently elected prime minister had no grand motivation apart from saving the skins of Labour MPs and fanning a few egos.
A Martin Lewis budget is fine, but Labour chose Andy Burnham as its leader and the public were promised a Burnham budget. They’re still waiting.
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Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist and the Guardian’s senior economics commentator
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