2p cut to national insurance already reported and further tax cuts may come as chancellor announces spring budget
Normally the shadow chancellor would respond to a Commons statement by the chancellor, but on budget day parliamentary convention means that the leader of the opposition has to do it. Luckily, this is a task Keir Starmer has been preparing for. In his new biography of Starmer (which is excellent – I’ll write about it at more length on another day), Tom Baldwin quotes Starmer aide Chris Ward as saying that soon after Starmer became an MP in 2015 he started thinking about what he would do on days like today. “We’d book afternoons out to practise. There would be a budget and I’d say to him, one day you might have to respond to this, so we’d sit down, go through the Treasury’s figures together, and work out what he would have done if he had been leader,” Ward told Baldwin.
Today’s budget has been drafted to hobble Labour as much as possible. In a good article for Politico, Esther Webber explains that there is a long history of chancellors acting like this. She says:
Glen O’Hara, professor of modern history at Oxford Brookes University, points to the gaping trade deficit left for Labour in 1964, when outgoing Tory Chancellor Reginald Maudling infamously left a note for his successor reading: “Good luck, old cock … sorry to leave it in such a mess.”
Conservative Chancellor Norman Lamont’s pre-election budget in 1992 introduced a lower rate of income tax which Labour opposed, allowing the Tories to portray them as a “high-tax party.” The Tories unexpectedly went on to win the subsequent poll.