Beware Hunt’s hype. There’s more poverty ahead and his budget did nothing to change that
I have spent more than 25 years covering budgets, because someone had to, and have learned one golden rule: for all the huff and puff, the ready reckoners and those blessed fan charts, most of what’s said evaporates from the public consciousness by the weekend. Out of all Jeremy Hunt’s promises today, only one will linger in the electorate’s memory: providing working parents with 30 hours of free childcare during term time for their babies and toddlers.
Not that you’d know. The chancellor gave it only brief airtime and got far more excited at the idea of building “12 potential Canary Wharfs”. But that’s the only policy guaranteed to light up WhatsApp groups this evening and perhaps to be remembered by many voters at the ballot box. It is also, according to the Office for Budget Responsibility, the measure that will do most to boost the economy – more than the much costlier giveaways to business. The pledge is shot through with more holes than Clint Eastwood’s cowboy hat, as we shall see, but it also contains important clues for how politics will play out between now and the next election.
Who knew? It turns out that proposing a big solution to a big problem and spending a few billion to achieve it reaches those parts of the electorate that smaller beer cannot. It turns out that even would-be technocrats such as Hunt and Rishi Sunak can do it, if they try. You can already see the outlines of a Tory offer come an election in 2024: it will be the party that straps on a suit and does deals with Joe Biden and Ursula von der Leyen. It can pull on a pair of hobnails and boot the daylights out of an Afghan teenager in a small boat. And it can also flash the cash and spend big on a couple of signature populist policies.
There is a
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