A Nice Budget for an Early Election?

This is how forty years of neoliberalism ends; not with a bang, but with a whimper

Anyone expecting Andy Burnham’s first budget to drown his nascent government in a bloodbath of tax hikes and giveaways will have been sorely disappointed yesterday. But so too would those who, believing Burnham’s words at Labour conference, were expecting an end to ‘forty years of neoliberalism’. On the first page of the Budget document, John Healey declares: ‘This budget commences the big changes needed to put the country on a better path.’ He tells us it will ‘unlock good growth in every postcode’, ‘give people hope for the future’, ‘bring energy bills down for good’, and ‘boos[t] the UK’s national security’. It is difficult to see how any of these lofty goals could possibly be achieved by the least consequential Budget since Philip Hammond’s (appropriately grey) Spring Budget in 2017. But with a socialist government in charge, a do-nothing Budget is probably the best we could hope for — especially given the absence of any sign of Miatta Fahnbulleh’s ‘radical co-operativist’ influence.