Budget 2017: As the cheering fades are the knives away?
If you missed the Budget, I can give you a quick summary, in Chancellor Philip Hammond’s own words, sort of.
“I’m a Chancellor for all Britain. A green Chancellor. A Chancellor for investment. A Chancellor for jobs. A Chancellor who champions the poor, the young, the nurses, the NHS... I’ll even clean up the oceans of plastic bags and build lots of houses.
“I’m a Chancellor for the future!”
Well, we’ll see about that last bit. They say never to turn your back on your enemies. For an hour or so he did. But fair dos, there was plenty of cheering from the Tory backbenchers.
At one point – the bit where he abolished stamp duty for most first time buyers – the cries of ‘More!’ from behind him grew so intense that he sat down to milk it.
Mr Hammond even talked about Brexit in terms of opportunities to be seized. A dead man walking – reborn! And at the end of it all there was so much waving of order papers that you could really believe that his critics among the Tory ranks had put their knives away, for the moment at least.
Has he done enough? What he had to do, both for himself and his party, commentators said in advance, was not mess up.
Now, it is early days. By the time you read this he may have already done a U-turn on something. Or somebody may have read the small print of Mr Hammond’s Budget and found one of those unpalatable nuggets that was not noticed at the time.
However, the initial impression is that it is indeed a no mess-up Budget.
Other things from the Budget. Fags up, but duty on most booze frozen.
More money for the NHS, which will receive a £7.5 billion increase to its resource budget over this year and the next. Is that £350 million a week? To work it out you might have to benefit from the big drive to boost maths teaching that was another of his announcements.
Then there were all those financial forecasts which are always taken seriously and provide lots of talking points, which is mystifying because the only thing you can confidently forecast is that these forecasts are going to be proven wrong – because they always are.
There are going to be 300 million homes a year on average by the mid-2020s. In fact, at one point, in a slip of the tongue, he spoke of the 1920s.
In response rose Jeremy Corbyn, which was never going to be an easy task and was made even less easy by the volume of the heckling and shouts from those opposite.
In any event you get the impression that this financial stuff is not really his thing, and he would have preferred to have left it to his sidekick John McDonnell. But there it is. Mr Corbyn initially received a ride so rough that the Deputy Speaker, Lindsay Hoyle, warned Tory hecklers: “If somebody wants to go for an early cup of tea, please do so. I’m told there are mince pies waiting.”
Translated, he was threatening them with what in sporting circles would be called an early bath – in other words, being asked to leave the chamber through misconduct.
Still the heckling continued. A needled Mr Corbyn at one point let rip at the “uncaring and uncouth attitude of certain members...”
His theme was that the government was failing on all fronts, the Budget would not make things better for ordinary people, and for them the misery continued.
All spin over substance, he said.
“This is a Budget of a government no longer fit for office,” he declared.
The Labour leader had been similarly targeted by Tory hecklers during Prime Minister’s Questions, when he chose Brexit as his main axis of attack, saying the government policy was a shambles.
“The Tory whips are choreographing who to shout at who in the chamber,” he said.
The House was called to order by the Speaker John Bercow, who said they should seek to emulate the Zen-like calm of the Father of the House (Ken Clarke).
“I have much in common with Zen, Mr Speaker,” said Mr Corbyn.
More from the Budget:
Curious to see what he meant, I looked up Zen on a BBC website.
“The essence of Zen Buddhism is achieving enlightenment by seeing one’s original mind (or original nature) directly; without the intervention of the intellect,” it explains.
What we learned from Theresa May is that the Tories’ new slogan is “building a Britain fit for the future.”
You’ll be hearing a lot of that now that strong and stable is out of fashion.
