Starmer offers little in response to Hunt’s Budget

Keir Starmer’s response to the Budget was delayed a little because the SNP forced a division on the immediate measures announced by the Chancellor. This was unusual, but if it gave the Labour leader a little more time to work out what he was going to say, it wasn’t clear he’d used it. He offered a stump speech that we’ve heard before: this was the ‘last, desperate act of a party that has failed’ and that there should be an election on 2 May. As I said earlier, if that was the last big event before Rishi Sunak calls a May election, he’s clearly aiming for a very low-key campaign that rests on the achievements of the past 14 years, rather than any last-minute flourishes.

Starmer wanted to suggest that the achievements of the last 14 years are somewhat minimal, that today’s announcements would be seen as a ‘Tory con’, and that instead the country will remember the damage done to the economy by Liz Truss’s mini-Budget.