Our household held its own Budget meeting, and the biggest party in the room was Don’t Know.
LONDON, England – By tradition, the Budget in our house is debated at the kitchen table on a Sunday evening, with a roast chicken in the middle and a calculator that nobody can find the batteries for. I took the minutes. I always take the minutes. It is the only way to be sure that I am the one who has the last word, and that it is spelled correctly.
Item one: attendance and apologies
Present: myself, my daughter, my sister Fenella, who had come for the chicken and stayed for the constitutional crisis, and Gordon from number 14, who was meant to be dropping off a ladder and has not yet left. Apologies were received from the cat, who finds all fiscal events a form of noise.
Fenella opened by saying that she did not trust any Budget she could not eat. My daughter said that was the most sensible thing anyone had said about economics since the invention of the biscuit. Gordon said it was “all smoke and mirrors”, which is what Gordon says about anything he has not personally lifted.
Item two: is it fair?
To keep the meeting honest I brought a poll. YouGov asked 2,036 adults in Great Britain how they reacted to the Budget, for The Times, over two days of fieldwork at the end of October. The headline is that 45 percent think the Budget is fair and 20 percent think it is not. A year ago the verdict on the previous Budget was 48 percent not fair against 21 percent fair.
So the nation has moved from “how dare you” to “I suppose so”, which is the single most British improvement in a poll that I can recall. Nobody in Britain has ever said “marvellous” about a Budget. The most we manage is “could have been worse”, said in the voice of a man who has just reversed into a bollard.
Gordon asked whether the poll counted him. I said yes, in the same way it counts the ladder.
Item three: standing charges, fuel and the rest
The measures are where the room warmed up. According to YouGov, the most popular were removing gas standing charges, delaying the 5p fuel duty rise and extending the electricity VAT cut to 2027, which 83 to 84 percent called the right thing to do at this time. When 83 percent of Britain agrees on something it is usually a queue, or a dislike of a particular biscuit.
Temporarily removing tariffs on many groceries and raising the business rate relief threshold from 12,000 pounds to 18,000 pounds scored between 75 and 78 percent. Energy payments of 100 pounds for council tax bands A to D, a rise in the National Living Wage and a new tax relief for business start-ups came in at 68 percent. I will not say what band this house is in, because Gordon would use it against me at the next bin day.
Less loved was a 2 percent rise in tax on property or savings interest, which 42 percent called wrong against 31 percent right. A temporary 3 percent bank tax for 15 months fared better, with 55 percent calling it the right thing. On giving councils control over business rates revenue, 38 percent said right, 19 percent wrong and 43 percent said they did not know. I can reveal that 43 percent of Britain does not know what its council does with a business rate, and the other 57 percent are in the council.
Item four: the Chancellor
On the Chancellor, John Healey, the poll found 23 percent think he is doing a good job and 22 percent a bad job, while 55 percent were undecided. The largest party in Britain, then, is Don’t Know, and has been for some time. It has no leader, no manifesto and an excellent turnout in every poll I have read, and I intend to join.
The same man has been in the news for the Energy Wealth Fund, which LBC reported alongside the Jackdaw decision as a way to channel North Sea tax revenues into renewable and low-carbon projects, starting with 2 billion pounds. Fenella said 2 billion pounds is a number that only ever appears in the news and never in a shop. My daughter wrote it down and underlined it, which in her handwriting is a threat.
Item five: the family outlook
Here the poll turns tender. Fifty-six percent expect the Budget to make no real difference to their family. Fifteen percent expect their family finances to improve and 20 percent to worsen, which is a lot calmer than last November, when half expected to be worse off. The poll also found that 74 percent think the economy is in a bad state, and that 59 percent expect it to get worse over the next year.
So we are a nation that thinks the economy is bad, expects it to get worse, and thinks the Budget is more or less fair. I think this is what is called mature. It is how you feel about a long-running family argument that has at last turned into a tradition.
Any other business
Under any other business, my daughter proposed a household stimulus of one extra biscuit per head. Carried, three votes to nil, with Gordon abstaining on the grounds that he had already had three. I also read out a piece from farm.fm on how the world spends 950 billion on farming and farmers check the mailbox, which Fenella said was the best description of a Budget she had ever heard. Nobody argued with that, which is rare.
If you are short of slang for the money part, a guide to the money words in Cockney rhyming slang will see you through, from bread and honey to the rest. I also put this evening’s minutes on The London Prat, with the British Onion corner of the site for anyone who finds a Budget hard to swallow, and more of my daily notes at The London Prat for those who want to read the chicken’s side of it.
The meeting closed at nine, when the chicken ran out. Gordon has still not gone. I have put the ladder by the door as a hint.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/