Spring statement

Wednesday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Iran attacked, Iran attacks and Starmer fumbles

Home Britain was not involved in the attack on Iran, Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, said, but a day later he gave America permission to use British bases (including Diego Garcia) ‘to prevent Iran firing missiles across the region’. He told the Commons, ‘This country does not believe in regime change from the skies,’ and ‘the only way forward is a negotiated outcome’. ‘This is not Winston Churchill that we’re dealing with,’ said President Donald Trump of America. A drone hit RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus; the destroyer HMS Dragon was dispatched there. At least 300,000 British citizens were said to be in the Gulf. Hannah Spencer for the Greens

Thursday

Michael Gove

Labour needs a sense of social justice

Clement Attlee, in the words of Winston Churchill, was a modest man with much to be modest about. Labour’s postwar premier has been invoked as a role model by Keir Starmer recently, in the context of Attlee’s support for Nato and robustness on defence. Starmer’s allies also argue that, like Attlee, he is an unshowy middle-England moderate who prefers quiet efficiency to ideological flamboyance. His biographer, the always perceptive Tom Baldwin, has declared: ‘There is no such thing as Starmerism.’ Nor, we are told, will there ever be. Which is exactly how, why and where this government is going wrong. A Tory government benefits from a sense of purpose; a

Monday

Katy Balls

Coffee House Shots Live with Maurice Glasman, David Frost and James Kanagasooriam

70 min listen

Join Katy Balls, Michael Gove, Lord Glasman, Lord Frost and pollster James Kanagasooriam as they unpack the highly anticipated Spring Statement and its implications for national policy and global security. Listen for: Michael’s plan for how to deal with the Donald, and why the Treasury is not fit for purpose; Maurice on his influence in the White House, and what’s wrong with the current political class; David’s reflections on why Brexit was ahead of its time; and James’s explanation for Britain’s lost sense of community.

Katy Balls

‘Do you think people are stupid?’ Rishi Sunak grilled by MPs

After unveiling his spring statement on Wednesday, Rishi Sunak found himself under attack from all sides: his personal approval ratings dived amid a media backlash and criticism from his own side. So, the Chancellor’s appearance this afternoon before the Treasury Select Committee on paper made for a painful session.  Over the course of several hours, the committee of MPs quizzed him on whether he thought people were ‘stupid’ when it came to his pre-election tax cut, the impact of Brexit on trade and why he had borrowed a Sainsbury’s worker’s Kia for a publicity shot. When it came to the latter question, Sunak admitted that his team has asked a supermarket worker

Thursday

Oscar Edmondson

Reeves goes on the defensive

14 min listen

It’s the morning after the afternoon before, and Rachel Reeves has just finished her broadcast round, where she has faced tough questions and negative splashes in the papers. The Daily Mail brands Reeves ‘deluded’, while the Daily Telegraph warns of ‘five years of record taxes’. The Guardian splashes with ‘Reeves accused of balancing books at expense of the poor’, while the Financial Times says, ‘Tax rise fears cloud Reeves’s fiscal fix’. She is navigating two main issues: first, the additional welfare reforms have caused disquiet in the Labour Party, with a potential rebellion on the horizon; second, the conversation has already turned to whether she will have to return for further tax rises in the autumn. Meanwhile, her

Katy Balls

Labour’s popularity contest

A few months ago, over a plate of bone marrow, a Tory adviser was considering how best to kneecap Labour. With the government’s working majority at 168, opposition debates could only go so far. Viral attack videos were hard to come by and CCHQ was depleted. Then the adviser hit upon something: a league table of cabinet ministers ranked by the Labour membership. It was an idea that arose from bitter experience. The Conservative-Home website has for years been running a grassroots ranking, showing which ministers were favoured by party members. It has proved such an accurate tracker about who was in pole position for any tilt at a leadership

The Spectator

The underlying message of Rachel Reeves’s Spring Statement

Rachel Reeves may not be the most mellifluous writer ever to inhabit 11 Downing Street. At the weekend, she informed readers of the Mail on Sunday that she would ‘make no apology for keeping an iron grip on the country’s finances’ but was happy to spend money on training more ‘brickies, sparkies and chippies’. The lurch from cliché to fake colloquialism does not suggest Reeves will be bracketed with Disraeli, Gladstone, Churchill or Lawson. But there is one addition to the political lexicon for which Reeves is responsible and which deserves a revival – ‘securonomics’. Before Labour’s election, the term was never far from Reeves’s lips. Launched with great fanfare

Wednesday

Katy Balls

Labour’s ‘Sabrina Carpenter’ Budget

18 min listen

This afternoon, Rachel Reeves made good on her promise to deliver only one fiscal set piece per calendar year by announcing what is widely being considered a Budget… this precedes a spending review in the summer and an actual Budget in the autumn. The headline is that the Chancellor had to find £15 billion in spending cuts to restore her headroom and keep within her own ‘ironclad’ fiscal rules. This comes after the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) confirmed that the £9.9 billion margin she left herself in the autumn has disappeared. The OBR has also halved its growth projections – bleak news for the government. Among the announcements: further

Coffee House

Spring Statement: Rachel Reeves says 2025 growth forecast halved

Rachel Reeves delivered some bad news in her Spring Statement: the UK’s growth forecast has been halved to 1 per cent for 2025. But the Chancellor revealed that the Office for Budget Responsibility has upgraded its longer-term growth estimates from 2026. Reeves also announced a benefits shake-up and a crackdown on tax avoidance. Here’s how it unfolded on our live blog:

Tuesday

Oscar Edmondson

Could Cabinet turn on Reeves?

13 min listen

Hard hats on for the Spring Statement tomorrow, where at around midday Rachel Reeves will deliver her fiscal update (read: significant fiscal set piece). Aside from not spooking the markets, the Chancellor will be hoping that she doesn’t spook those within her own party. There are rumours of discontent circling around Westminster about a potential Labour split. We have already seen secretaries of state briefing out their discontent over potential departmental cuts. Ministers have also been breaking rank this week to criticise Rachel Reeves for accepting free Sabrina Carpenter tickets. Can she keep the party united? Oscar Edmondson speaks to Katy Balls and John McTernan, former political secretary to Tony

Thursday

Katy Balls and Michael Simmons

‘Austerity is back’: Inside Labour’s emergency budget 

Dominic Cummings may have left Whitehall but his spirit lives on. Pat McFadden, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, has repurposed Cummings’s call for ‘weirdos and misfits’ as a plea for ‘innovators and disruptors’. Downing Street this month launched an ‘AI Ideas’ competition in pursuit of bright sparks. A hackathon will follow. In No. 10 and 11, aides channel Cummings’s language as they talk of acting as an ‘insurgent’ government. ‘We’re all Dom now,’ says one government figure. In one area, Cummings’s influence on the new government is most apparent: the diagnosis of a failing state. Keir Starmer’s chief aide Morgan McSweeney has never met Cummings, but these days

Rupert Harrison

It’s time for Rachel Reeves to stop gambling

Next Wednesday Rachel Reeves will stand up in the House of Commons to deliver what she is calling her ‘spring forecast’. As so often with political language, everyone in Westminster knows it is no such thing, just as there was nothing ‘mini’ about Kwasi Kwarteng’s Budget of September 2022. The ‘spring forecast’ will be an emergency Budget, and the reasons for it reveal a surprising truth about the Chancellor of the Exchequer: she is an inveterate gambler. Unless everything turns out to be a brilliant exercise in expectation management, the worst-kept secret in Whitehall is that Reeves has already broken her ‘iron-clad’ fiscal rules. The Chancellor’s team will receive the

Wednesday

James Heale

Spring Statement or ‘Emergency Budget’?

12 min listen

The question that everyone in Westminster wants answered is what will actually be included in next week’s Spring Statement. Previously, the Spring Statement wasn’t looking like much to write home about – little more than an update. But with the economy taking a turn for the worse and her fiscal headroom narrowing, it has taken on renewed importance for Rachel Reeves, with the opposition trying their best to brand it as an ‘Emergency Budget’. What does Reeves need to do to calm the markets? Also on the podcast, Pensions Minister Torsten Bell gave an interesting interview to Newsnight last night, defending the government’s welfare reforms. Where are we with the fallout from

Friday

James Heale

The UK economy is shrinking – how much pressure is Rachel Reeves under?

14 min listen

New figures from the Office for National Statistics show the UK economy unexpectedly shrunk by 0.1% in January. This comes only a few weeks after the Chancellor’s pro-growth speech, and a fortnight ahead of her Spring Statement. Just how much pressure is Rachel Reeves under? And how likely is it that Labour will change their approach? Economics editor Michael Simmons and deputy political editor James Heale join Patrick Gibbons to discuss, as well as a look ahead to next week’s expected announcement on reducing the welfare bill. Produced by Patrick Gibbons.

Wednesday

Michael Gove

Could spending cuts herald a ‘winter of discontent for Labour’s left’?

15 min listen

With reports of ‘billions’ of spending cuts earmarked for the Chancellor’s Spring Statement, taking place later this month, Michael Gove and Kate Andrews join Katy Balls to discuss what exactly Rachel Reeves could cut. With little fiscal headroom and sluggish forecasts of growth, Reeves doesn’t appear to have many options. It’s likely that welfare will be targeted, and there are reports that Labour’s opposition to new North Sea oil & gas licences may be relaxed to stimulate growth. One area that appears off the table is defence – following the Prime Minister’s pledge to cut international aid in order to fund new defence spending.  But if all these reports are

Thursday

Ross Clark

Can we trust economic models?

Rishi Sunak shared a delightful moment of honesty on the Today programme on Thursday. Mishal Husain asked him how households will cope if, as the Office for Budget Responsibility has forecast, energy bills rise by a further £830 a year – on top of the rises already due to take effect in April. No, no, no, said the Chancellor, you can’t believe the OBR forecast on energy prices: ‘They just take what the market expectation is at a given time, and since they closed their forecast actually the forecast for energy bills in the autumn has come down by £400.’ It was a fair point. Except, if the Chancellor doesn’t think

Katy Balls

Is Sunak’s spring statement starting to unravel?

The Chancellor woke this morning to a grim set of headlines as the newspapers chew over his spring statement. Despite dangling the carrot of an income tax cut by 2024, most papers focus on the OBR’s projection that inflation will lead to the biggest fall in living standards since records began in the 1950s. While left-leaning papers such as the Guardian accuse Sunak of forgetting the poorest in society, the papers on the right aren’t that much better for him. The Express asks about the ‘forgotten millions’, while the Telegraph roundly criticises his economic package. The Daily Mail has run with a slightly more welcome tone for Sunak but ultimately calls for more tax cuts

The Spectator

The return of fiscal conservatism

Next month, Rishi Sunak will break a Tory manifesto pledge by increasing National Insurance as the tax burden heads to a 77-year high. By declining to increase departmental spending for inflation – and using the saved money to cut the basic rate of income tax – the Chancellor has started a cautious fightback against Big Government conservatism. Much has changed in the two years since Sunak took over as Chancellor. Back then, inflation appeared dead and buried: long-term forecasts did not envisage it going above 2 per cent. Sajid Javid, Sunak’s predecessor, said he expected rates to be ‘low for long’ – and planned to borrow and spend on that

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Spring statement, weapons for Ukraine and no more free-range eggs

Home Britain had provided Ukraine with more than 4,000 Next Generation Light Anti-tank Weapons, the Ministry of Defence said. Shell reconsidered its decision to pull out of investing in the large Cambo oil field, 75 miles off the west coast of Shetland. The government was expected to put into special administration Gazprom Marketing & Trading Retail Ltd, with which several councils have contracts to buy gas, though it does not come from Russia. Among those seeking to buy Chelsea Football Club, on sale after the sanctioning of its owner Roman Abramovich, a group called the True Blue Consortium was given support by John Terry. On one day, 213 non-Ukrainian migrants

James Forsyth

The Chancellor’s difficult choices

The Office for Budget Responsibility was designed to protect the Chancellor from accusations that he is cooking the books. If the forecasts are prepared by an independent body, there can’t be the suggestion – as there often was before the OBR’s creation in 2010 – that they have been politically influenced. But what the OBR cannot do is eliminate uncertainty. In recent years, the likely trajectory of the financial future changed quite a lot from one month to the next: from interest rates and inflation to the Covid pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The OBR itself admits that it had to conduct its work without knowing the full economic