Britain’s budget choices are not as bad as the government says
It has more room for manoeuvre than it lets on
The mood music from Britain’s new government about its first budget has been a funeral dirge. “There’s a budget coming in October and it’s going to be painful,” Sir Keir Starmer, the prime minister, warned in August. “The road ahead is steeper and harder than we expected,” said Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, at the Labour Party’s conference on September 23rd. A day later Sir Keir invoked “the iron law of properly funding policies”.
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This article appeared in the Britain section of the print edition under the headline “Loosening the chains”
Britain September 28th 2024
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From the September 28th 2024 edition
Discover stories from this section and more in the list of contents
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British MPs vote in favour of assisted dying
A monumental social reform is closer to being realised
The slow death of a Labour buzzword
And what that says about Britain’s place in the world
Britain’s Supreme Court considers what a woman is
At last. Britons had been wondering what those 34m people who are not men might be
Can potholes fuel populism?
A new paper looks at one explanation for the rise of Reform UK
Are British voters as clueless as Labour’s intelligentsia thinks?
How the idea of false consciousness conquered the governing party