Budget Responsibility?

How does Rachel Reeves know that this is the first Budget to be delivered by a woman? How dare she presume to know the gender identity of Denis Healey, Nigel Lawson, Gordon Brown or Philip Hammond? But George Osborne's has always been anyone's guess.

If a pound on your bus to work and another pound on your bus back "won't make any difference", then why will a penny off a pint of beer? How many pubs will even pass it on? For a commuter on minimum wage, the 50 per cent increase in bus fares will be the equivalent of a four per cent increase in income tax. The minimum wage will go up in April, but the bus fares will go up in January, and everything else is going up now, not least energy prices as we head into winter. The huge rise in employer's National Insurance contributions will preclude any pay rises in the face of this galloping inflation, any official fall in which is only prices going up by less than the last time that the Government checked. They are still going up.

Keeping the present income tax and employee's National Insurance thresholds until 2028 will be a huge increase in taxation, with those thresholds only then rising in line with inflation in time for the General Election, as if we were all stupid. Being practically impossible, sickness and disability benefit fraud is as good as non-existent, so the only way to deliver today's cuts is by requiring the failure of a quota of claims regardless of medical circumstances, even if that meant that the claimants died, as some of them will.

Like Keir Starmer, Reeves promised that there would be no return to austerity, so it cannot be austerity that the budgets of five Departments are to be cut, including a 3.2 per cent cut to the Home Office that was now "dispersing" the residents of the Bibby Stockholm. We have been paying £400 million per year to rent that 48-year-old engineless barge, which cannot be worth more than a few million pounds. Political kickbacks? What do you think? And to only one party? What do you think? Like HS2 and the Rwanda Scheme, that should be subject to someone like the Covid Corruption Commissioner. Except that we have yet to see who was going to be the Covid Corruption Commissioner.

This is all for what? The uniparty's precious Office for Budget Responsibility predicts that the economy will grow by 1.1 per cent this year, and two per cent in 2025. But from 2026, growth is predicted to be weaker than previously forecast, at least by the OBR, slowing to 1.5 per cent by 2028. Yet we are to pay Ukraine three billion pounds per year "for as long as it takes". For as long as it takes until what? The unconditional surrender of the Russian Federation? And that is before we have even mentioned the recent BRICS Summit in Kazan.

Look, this Budget is not all bad. None of them ever quite is. The justice for the Mineworkers' Pension Scheme is especially welcome here in the North East. Yet overall here, the dualling of the A1 has been cancelled, there is to be no Leamside Line investment, and even the Crown Works money had already been announced in March by Jeremy Hunt. Andy Burnham and Tracy Brabin have promised to keep the two pound cap on bus fares, while Kim McGuinness has said nothing. But Brabin and even Burnham do at least have some ties to the Left. McGuinness is purely a creature of the Labour Right, whose hatred of buses is visceral.

My Labour MP is disabled. North Durham is full of communities that, mostly but not exclusively since the pits closed, depend on the buses to get people to and from work that is rarely well-paid. He holds no Government position. On recent polling, he was projected to lose his seat. When this matter came to the vote, then we shall be watching.

As they will be watching in numerous constituencies that Labour won back this year, or won for the first time in a long time, or won for the first time ever, but which now faced the removal of agricultural property relief, meaning that on a family farm valued at over one million pounds, a family inheriting it will have to pay tax at 20 per cent. The average farm is worth eight million pounds, meaning a tax bill of £1.4 million, in practice payable only by selling the farm either to a property developer, thereby removing the land from food production altogether, or to some corporate agribaron, quite possibly putting control of the food supply in foreign hands, or in tax-avoiding offshore ones that amounted to the same thing. Goodbye to family farms. Goodbye to agricultural communities, which also depend heavily on buses where they are lucky enough to have them, just as the former Red Wall does. This Government either does not understand any of the places that have made it the Government, or it simply does not care.