Rachel Reeves’s budget: a study in farce, folly and fiscal flagellation
TetleysTLDR: The summary
Rachel Reeves’s Budget is a polished shambles dressed up as responsibility. She scrapped the two-child benefit cap, the one genuinely decent act in the whole performance, then promptly clawed back far more through a decade-long freeze on tax thresholds. This ‘everyone must contribute’ line really means working people will pay ever more while the wealthy barely notice a flutter in their accountants’ spreadsheets. The mansion tax is a token gesture, the Motability changes a petty swipe at disabled people and online gamblers get battered while the country set remain untouched.
The most absurd move is the new mileage tax on electric cars. After years of urging people to go green, the government has effectively slapped a penalty charge on environmental virtue. With EV costs already high and infrastructure still inadequate, this kills confidence stone dead. In short: a Budget that raises money by punishing exactly the wrong people.
TetleysTLDR: The long bit
Rachel Reeves entered the Commons with the expression of a woman determined to demonstrate competence while hoping no one noticed the smell of burning coming from the Treasury. She clutched her Budget like a nervous vicar gripping a sermon on sin, and insisted firmly, repeatedly, almost hysterically that her plans involved neither austerity nor reckless borrowing. One imagined her repeating this to herself in the mirror at 5am like an affirmation printed on a mindfulness calendar. It reminded me of Tupps in the League of Gentlemen helpfully interjecting into the conversation with "We didn't burn him".
The day had already descended into faustian chaos long before she reached the despatch box. The Office for Budget Responsibility, an institution supposedly dedicated to sobriety and order, had obligingly dumped the entire Budget online ahead of schedule. The effect was instant: MPs pretending they had not seen the thing, journalists pretending they had and Reeves herself scribbling furious amendments onto her speech like a schoolteacher discovering that half the class had read her exam answers on the staff room fridge. Into this thunderously unpromising atmosphere she unleashed her Budget, a document that purported to balance compassion and discipline while in reality delivering the political equivalent of offering a warm handshake with one hand and rifling through the listener’s pockets with the other.
To give credit where it is due, the scrapping of the two–child benefit cap was the one unambiguously decent measure in the whole affair. Reeves spoke earnestly about every child deserving a fair chance, and for a brief and unusual moment Parliament nodded in collective approval. Ending a policy designed specifically to grind larger poor families into dust is, undeniably, a step toward civilisation.
Unfortunately, this fleeting moment of humanity was quickly swallowed by the tidal wave of fiscal thuggery that followed. The centrepiece of the Budget, though Reeves tried to shuffle it into a quiet corner, was the freezing of tax thresholds until 2031. By that point these thresholds will have been immobile for so long archaeologists could dig them up and confidently date them to a forgotten dynasty. Reeves once described the Tory version of this policy as ‘picking the pockets of working people’. Now she does it herself, albeit with a neat manicure and a better press officer.
Rachel Reeves herself performed like an over-eager headmistress convinced that brisk confidence could hide the smell of panic seeping from her paperwork. She thumped through the Budget with the determination of someone assembling flat-pack furniture without instructions, smiling tightly each time she announced another measure designed to 'help working people' while quietly extracting a tenner from their back pockets.
Between the moral grandstanding and the spreadsheet jargon, she radiated the manic cheerfulness of a woman absolutely certain she’s done the right thing precisely because everyone affected is groaning. Even as the OBR leak turned the chamber into a farce, she ploughed on, scribbling amendments, jabbing her finger at the benches, and insisting the numbers all added up provided, of course, nobody examined them too closely. It was a performance of competence rather than the thing itself, delivered with the breezy zeal of someone rearranging deckchairs on a listing ship.
Fiscal drag is one of those phrases designed to lull the public into thinking nothing exciting is happening, when in fact it is daylight robbery conducted slowly enough that people forget to scream. Your wages go up, your tax band quietly jumps, and the government skims a little more off the top with all the grace of a dodgy landlord adding ‘administration fees’ onto the rent. The so–called mansion tax: a triumph of marketing over substance, followed the same pattern. Properties worth over £2 million will be charged £2,500 a year from 2028, a sum indistinguishable from pocket fluff to anyone wealthy enough to own one. Homes worth over £5 million will pay £7,500, which in the affected boroughs is roughly what one spends on artisanal cushions or the Nuffield bills when the owner 'accidentally' findsa piece of fruit lodged firmly up his anus. Of course, despite the faux outrage from those fortunate enough to be affected, the super–rich will glide serenely past this surcharge, scarcely aware of it, pausing only to sign the cheque with the sort of lazy flourish normally reserved for birthday cards to minor cousins, or a quiet abortion for the nanny.
Disabled people, naturally, have also been included in the grand plan. The Motability scheme will ‘remove luxury vehicles’, a phrase that would be harmless if not for the Treasury’s historic fondness for labelling anything more comfortable than a wonky wheelbarrow as ‘luxury’. It’s a classic administrative manoeuvre: claim to be restoring purpose while quietly ensuring that anyone with a mobility need must do without anything remotely pleasant.
Gambling taxes rise for the online mob while the countryside horse–fancying set remain largely untroubled. One can imagine the logic: it is easier to squeeze money out of a man glued to a mobile phone than from a chap standing in tweed, holding binoculars and promising to ‘make a fuss’ if inconvenienced.
All of this of course is merely the warm–up to the most epically spectacular misjudgement of the entire Budget: the decision to punish electric car owners as though they had committed an act of prolonged insolence.
For years the British public was encouraged, coaxed, bribed and downright nagged into buying electric vehicles. They were the future, the clean alternative, the key to meeting climate targets and sparing our children from needing swimming lessons just to get to school. Grants and incentives abounded, public campaigns flourished and millions of motorists were persuaded to invest in machines which, while noble in purpose, often drove like expensive irons strapped to a battery pack.
And now? A mileage tax. A mileage tax... A MILEAGE TAX!!! Three pence per mile for electric cars, one and a half for hybrids. A fresh blooming of vehicle duty alongside it, like a fungus sprouting from a damp bedsit belonging to a Labour Minister.
Now of course electric cars already cost more than their petrol counterparts, charging at public points is priced like luxury spa levels and thanks to their insistence on spontaneously combusting, require insurance premiums high enough to make grown men walk to work in the rain.
So the one financial consolation :cheaper running costs has now fly-tipped into a hedge with the breezy indifference of a civil servant discarding a broken stapler. The justification is ‘fairness’, a word that in government usage now means ‘we need more money and you look like you might have some’.
The funds will supposedly go into road maintenance and more charging points, which is rather like offering to repair someone’s roof after first charging them a tax for owning a ladder.
Predictably, this will kill off confidence in electric vehicles at the exact moment when that confidence was already wobbling. Who, apart from the zealously eco-minded or the catastrophically minted will now invest in an EV? Why would any rational person sink their savings into a technology so obviously at the mercy of whichever Treasury official happens to be in a funny mood on the morning policy is drafted? Manufacturers will fume, buyers will stall, the green transition will slump into a ditch and ministers will mutter sombrely about ‘market conditions’ as though they had not personally planted a landmine under the entire project.
And so the Budget ends as it began: a curious mixture of noble aspiration and idiotic cruelty, delivered with a straight face by a government determined to appear responsible while quietly flogging the public with inventive new revenue instruments. In its pages one finds compassion, yes, but only as garnish to a main dish consisting of taxes, penalties and the sort of administrative logic that would embarrass a colonial governor in a farce. The result is predictable: working people will pay more, the wealthy will yawn politely and the drivers of electric cars: those poor, earnest fools who believed the last decade of government promises, bought to them after they flogged off their diesel hatchbacks after the decaes before government promises, will be left clutching a charging cable and wondering at what point environmental virtue became a taxable offence.
Rounding off the comedy of errors like an extra week in Panto on Blackpool Pier, Reeves also managed the impressive feat of taxing pensioners while boasting about a minimum wage, something that most pensioners will never see and half the country will never actually collect. With a straight face, she talked about 'asking everyone to contribute', which in Budget-speak means raiding the pockets of people who’ve already spent forty years contributing and would quite like to buy heating this winter without taking out a small loan. Meanwhile, the proudly announced minimum wage rise sits there like a glossy prop: technically impressive, politically convenient, and utterly meaningless to the millions trapped in zero-hours contracts, fake self-employment or jobs that magically roster them just below the qualifying hours. The whole arrangement has the finesse of charging an old man for breathing too loudly while presenting him with a commemorative certificate for his ‘lifetime of service’. I t’s theatre, nothing more and quite frankly not even good theatre.
By the time she reached the final page of her Budget now creased, smudged and annotated like the confessions of a nervous embezzler, the Chancellor had the wild-eyed look of someone who’d been force-marched through their own PowerPoint. One could almost see the thought bubble forming above her head: the urgent, overwhelming desire to go home, collapse onto that threadbare sofa she’s spent the last month rummaging down the back of for stray pound coins and finish the half-empty bottle she’d uncorked while practising her lines in front of the mirror. The image was irresistible: Reeves sprawled like a defeated Victorian heroine amongst the loose change, lint and lost biros, knocking back the dregs of warm Waitrose Vino Collapso while muttering, ‘Fiscal responsibility… fully funded… fully costed…’, before passing out in the faint aroma of DFS fabric cleaner and political self-justification.
Kemi Bad Enoch’s response to the Budget resembled a flustered prefect trying to discipline a school assembly while her notes blew across the playground. She rose to the despatch box full of manufactured outrage, only to discover she had nothing of substance to say beyond spluttering about the OBR leak like a dinner guest complaining the gravy boat had dripped on the tablecloth. Faced with Reeves’s fiscal contortions, she flailed between indignation and confusion, waving her hands in the vague hope that righteous fury might materialise if she kept gesticulating long enough. Instead she produced a rambling tirade so devoid of coherence it left her own backbenchers staring at their shoes. What was meant to be a devastating rebuttal landed with all the force of a wet napkin, confirming once again that Bad Enoch’s bark vastly exceeds her bite: and even the bark sounds like someone kicking a recycling bin.
If this was her idea of fiscal authority, it ended not with triumph but with the unmistakable whiff of a Chancellor who’d rather drown in the sofa stuffing than defend another sentence of her own Budget.
Meanwhile as the country shrugs in a meh of whatever, those chinless morality free rich wankspanners who claimed they were going to leave country after the budget because they didn't want to pay any more tax than they are currently avoiding, unfortunately are still fucking here.
If I could afford the water bill, I'd run a bath, because it is abundantly clear our Government couldn't.