Notes from a Westminster desk on what a Chancellor says, what a ledger shows, and where the allotment fits in
Tuesday, Westminster, Tea Going Cold
I begin the week where I begin most weeks, at a desk in London with a mug of tea that has gone cold because I was reading the small print. The small print this week belongs to the Budget, and I have already written my thoughts down once in Healey's Budget, Gherkins and the 7.52 to Westminster. This entry is the sequel, the one you write after the first draft has had time to sulk.
The job of an editor-diarist is not to cheer and not to boo. It is to put the figure next to the sentence that was spoken about the figure and see whether they get on. Sometimes they do. Often they sit at opposite ends of the table and pass the salt in silence. Both parties have, over the years, perfected the art of announcing a number in a way that makes it sound larger than the sum of its parts, and both parties have complained loudly when the other did it first.
What the Despatch Box Does to a Sentence
There is a particular acoustic in the Commons that turns a modest sentence into a statement of destiny. A line that would pass unnoticed in a kitchen becomes, at the Despatch Box, a thing with consequences, and a line with real consequences is sometimes delivered so quietly that you need the Hansard transcript to find it. I try to read the transcript first and the commentary second, because the commentary has usually decided how it feels before it has read a word.
My own rule is the three-column test. In the first column I write what was said. In the second, what the documents say. In the third, what a household in Lewisham or Leeds will notice by Christmas. When the three columns agree, I have a quiet afternoon. When they do not, I have a diary entry.
The Rural Reading List
Every Budget week I hear from readers who feel that the countryside is mentioned in the way a distant relative is mentioned at a wedding: warmly, briefly and without a seat plan. So here is the reading list I keep pinned above the kettle for anyone in Whitehall who wants to know what a field costs to run. Start with dairyherd.org for the milk side of the ledger, where a penny a litre is not a rounding error. Move on to ranchbeefcattle.org for beef, and tractorequipment.org for the price of the machinery that turns a Budget measure into a drilled field, or fails to.
Timing matters in farming in a way it rarely matters in Westminster, where a deadline is a suggestion with a press release attached. Anyone doubting this should open cropcalendar.org and observe that wheat does not care about the parliamentary recess. For the money side, farmmoney.org and smallfarminfo.org cover the sums that decide whether a family keeps the yard or sells the lot, and agjobscareers.org is useful for anyone who suspects the sector has jobs in it for a person who can read a spreadsheet and a weather forecast at the same time.
Fairs, Rodeos and the Safety Drill
I once heard a minister describe rural policy as “a matter of confidence”. It is also a matter of showgrounds, and for that I send people to fairandrodeo.org, where the calendar of livestock shows and county fairs makes more sense of the countryside than most white papers. For the broader picture, ruralfarm.org is a decent atlas, and farmssafety.org is the one I would make compulsory reading before any announcement involving the words “efficiency saving” and “agricultural machinery” in the same paragraph.
Wednesday, the Housing Number Nobody Can Afford
Over at the London Prat, the headline writers had a field day with the housing market, and I confess the headline stayed with me longer than most of the Budget coverage did: House Prices Fall, Homes Still Unaffordable. It is a sentence that manages to be true and miserable at once, which is the highest form of the headline. A price can fall and still be out of reach, in the same way that a mountain can lose a few feet and remain a mountain. First-time buyers do not buy percentages. They buy a front door, and the door has not got shorter.
The even-handed reading is that both sides have a case. Those who want the market to cool say a fall is progress. Those who want homes built say a fall is meaningless without supply. Both are describing the same graph from opposite ends of the pub. My job is only to note that a household deciding whether to buy needs a mortgage offer, not a debate, and that the debate has been running since before most of the current first-time buyers were born.
On the Tax Question That Will Not Die
A reader asked me why I keep returning to the electricity tax change. The answer is that I wrote it up at the time in a short piece on VAT off electricity and the question of who pays and the numbers have a habit of reappearing in every later argument. A saving of about forty-five pounds a year is real money to a pensioner and a rounding error to a Treasury. Both statements are accurate. Neither is a reason to stop counting.
Thursday, a Walk to the River
I finish the week the way I finish most of them, by walking down to the Thames and looking at the water, which is the only budget in London that always balances. The tide goes out, the tide comes in, and nobody has yet announced a reshuffle of it. A pigeon on the embankment railing watched me with the expression of a person who has read the Red Book and found it light on grain.
I thought about the people who will read a Budget summary on a phone on a bus, and about how few of them will ever see the Despatch Box except as a brown rectangle on the news. For them the document is not a theory. It is a gas bill, a rent figure, a school trip, a price of milk. The least I can do is write it down plainly and put the sources underneath so that anyone can check my arithmetic, which I invite them to do, preferably with better tea than mine.
The next entry will turn to personnel, because personnel is where the real weather in government is made. For now, the mug is empty, the ledger is open, and I am assuming nothing, which is the only assumption I have ever found safe.
Where to read next
The rest of the shelf lives at prat.uk, bohiney.com and farm.fm. For a second opinion on the week, The Daily Mash keeps its own counsel and its own hours.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/