There was a time when Chancellors of the Exchequer believed the Budget was such an important and economically sensitive event that they and their team would go into purdah for several weeks beforehand.
The logic of this secrecy was plain. Leaks and speculation – especially when officially sanctioned – can have hugely damaging effects on markets and panic individuals into making bad financial decisions.
One previous Labour Chancellor, Hugh Dalton, had to resign after briefing a journalist about what his forthcoming budget might contain. His boss, Clement Attlee, took a dim view. ‘It’s dangerous to play party politics with the Budget,’ he said. ‘It opens the way to every kind of stunt.’
How times have changed. One can only imagine what the Labour luminary would have thought of the stream of Budget leaks and counter-leaks emanating from the Treasury in recent weeks.
They have been gushing like water from a broken tap. Westminster insiders call it ‘pitch-rolling’, throwing out theoretical policies to see how they land.
But this irresponsible game-playing by Rachel Reeves and the preposterous coterie of political pygmies around her has human consequences – all of them bad and some irreversible. She is toying with lives and livelihoods.
To cite one disgraceful example, the Chancellor’s aides let it be known she was considering drastically reducing the maximum tax-free sum people can take from their pension fund after the age of 55.
As a result, anxious savers have rushed in droves to take their lump sum early, which means that part of their fund will cease to grow and could leave them with a serious shortfall in old age.
For weeks, Chancellor Rachel Reeves (pictured) and her ministers have been overtly softening the country up for an income tax hike, in breach of a key manifesto promise.
Five days ago, Treasury ‘sources’ ruled out making changes to the tax-free limit. They could easily have done that months ago but chose not to.
Ms Reeves herself could have assuaged fears by dismissing it in her pre-Budget speech last week. That she waited this long was callous and cruel, as those savers can’t now put the money back.
Her latest howler is a shock U-turn on income tax. For weeks, she and her ministers have been overtly softening the country up for an income tax hike, in breach of a key manifesto promise.
Yesterday, after much disquiet within the party, the Chancellor let it be known she would not be raising income tax after all. Government borrowing rates, already sky-high, climbed further at this reversal for two reasons.
First, they don’t know how she now plans to fill the financial black hole she has dug for herself and are worried that more ruinous borrowing and a ‘smorgasbord’ of growth-crushing taxes elsewhere will send the economy into tailspin.
Second, they realise Ms Reeves is not in control. She is being buffeted by the whims and grandstanding of Labour’s activist Left-wing MPs, most of whom have never had to make a living in the real world and have no conception of why fiscal prudence matters.
They have thwarted even modest attempts to trim welfare spending, and it seems certain they will bully Ms Reeves into lifting the two-child benefit cap, costing yet more money the country can’t afford.
The truth is that this Chancellor is weak, rudderless and devoid of any coherent vision for reviving the economy. And whatever horrors she delivers in this omnishambles Budget, you can bet it will be the hard-pressed families of Middle Britain who continue to suffer most.
