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The House of Commons was standing room only.
MPs lined-up, squashed-in, perched.
Not quite hanging off the rafters but hanging on every word of the Chancellor’s Spring Statement… don’t call it a budget.
What happened?
It was all about nine billion quids worth of headroom in the economy which looked like, because of inflation, wars, productivity and a miscalculation… was ebbing away.
With a lot of jiggery-pokery, she’s back on target for the nine billion. Not breaking her iron-clad rules.
I have no idea why it needed fixing before the next budget.
So that’s OK then? Errr…. not really.
There is this… HMG’s own document: Spring Statement 2025 health and disability benefit reforms.
Impact;
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The reforms are expected to make welfare savings of £4.8bn by 2029-30;
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£4.5 billion of this is in working age sickness and disability benefits.
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As a result, welfare spending is forecast to fall as a percentage of GDP.
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Some of the families impacted will be current recipients.
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Overall, it is estimated that in 2029/30 there will be 3.2 million families ... who will financially lose…[an average] of £1,720 per year.
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We estimate there will be an additional 250,000 people, including 50,000 children [pushed into] relative poverty…
Labour are saying that’s OK...
... because by then, the economy will have grown and people will be working.
So that’s OK then? Errr…. not really.
The OBR have halved their growth predictions to 1%.
The Chancellor’s banking on building.
Gambling on growth. Putting a huge wager on creating jobs and getting people back into work.
So that’s OK then? Errr…. not really.
You read the papers, just like I do.
You watch the telly, just like I do.
There’s a nutter in the Kremlin. A lunatic in the White House. We’ve virtually stopped our overseas aid, so we can afford to make tanks.
Meanwhile our economy is tanking.
With increases in employer’s national insurance contributions and the Employment Rights Bill, guess what;
- In the last quarter of 2024, the UK experienced its highest number of business closures in 20 years… 198,046 companies… exceeding figures from the financial crisis in 2009 and 2021.
- Companies House, have increased registration fees from £12 to £50… there’s been a 20% drop in new business registrations… the first decline since 2012.
The Labour Party seems to be bent on a mass escape from reality. I can’t see a future period of even modest prosperity.
Our lives are now the property of the economists and war mongers.
Our leaders merely spectators, as events far bigger than their understanding and more forceful than their power to direct them, overtake them.
We are left standing. Abandoned, to watch the idiocy of what’s lost… the security, human dignity and wellbeing of our fellow man, woman and their family…
... everything that matters.
Fiscal rules that are no more than inventions, deliver the grotesque image of rich people not taxed for fear they’ll run away and poor people taxed, made fearful because they have nowhere to run.
Our times single out politicians as though they were celebrities. We give them free tickets to glamorous events, so we can rub shoulders with them. Be seen with them.
Men of otherwise good judgement are somehow persuaded to buy them clothes and spectacles. Gifts beyond the wildest imaginings of the families who stand on the the precipice of poverty.
How foolish we have become. How lazy and undiscerning.
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