Budget

Wednesday

Katy Balls

Labour’s ‘Sabrina Carpenter’ Budget

18 min listen

This afternoon, Rachel Reeves made good on her promise to deliver only one fiscal set piece per calendar year by announcing what is widely being considered a Budget… this precedes a spending review in the summer and an actual Budget in the autumn. The headline is that the Chancellor had to find £15 billion in spending cuts to restore her headroom and keep within her own ‘ironclad’ fiscal rules. This comes after the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) confirmed that the £9.9 billion margin she left herself in the autumn has disappeared. The OBR has also halved its growth projections – bleak news for the government. Among the announcements: further

Coffee House

Spring Statement: Rachel Reeves says 2025 growth forecast halved

Rachel Reeves delivered some bad news in her Spring Statement: the UK’s growth forecast has been halved to 1 per cent for 2025. But the Chancellor revealed that the Office for Budget Responsibility has upgraded its longer-term growth estimates from 2026. Reeves also announced a benefits shake-up and a crackdown on tax avoidance. Here’s how it unfolded on our live blog:

Friday

Kate Andrews

Can Labour save its Budget?

After the Office for Budget Responsibility’s assessment of the Budget was published on Wednesday, the cost of government borrowing started to rise. Yesterday, those costs hit their highest levels this year, with the 10-year gilt yield peaking just over 4.5 per cent and the five-year gilt yield exceeding 4.4 per cent, before settling slightly by the end of the day.  Labour need this trend to stop. The further borrowing costs rise and the pound falls, the more expensive Reeves’s Budget becomes, as investors demand a higher return for lending to the UK. Moreover, the longer jitters persist, the more certain it will seem that markets have not bought Labour’s fiscal

Hamish McRae

Britain can grow faster than the OBR thinks

The UK economy may end up growing a bit faster by the end of this decade than the Office for Budget Responsibility expects – but if it does that will be no thanks to Rachel Reeves’s Budget.  The OBR’s projections are unambitious. This is their summary: ‘Having stagnated last year, the economy is expected to grow by just over 1 per cent this year, rising to 2 per cent in 2025, before falling to around 1½ per cent, slightly below its estimated potential growth rate of 1⅔ per cent, over the remainder of the forecast. Budget policies temporarily boost output in the near term, but leave GDP largely unchanged in five years.’

Thursday

Wednesday

Katy Balls

Three tests for Reeves’s first Budget

It’s Budget day in Westminster. The question being asked by Labour MPs: can Rachel Reeves pull it off? This lunchtime, the Chancellor will stand at the despatch box and pitch Labour’s first Budget for 14 years as necessary tough choices to ‘fix the foundations’ while also ensuring ‘working people don’t face higher taxes in their payslips’ (see Mr Steerpike for who Labour’s working people definition misses out). Reeves will use a report by the Office for Budget Responsibility to argue that the Tories left such a bad economic inheritance she had to take action. The Tories will try to argue in turn that Labour planned a tax raid (to the

Patrick O’Flynn Patrick O'Flynn

Will there be a surprise in Rachel Reeves’s Budget?

Most chancellors pull a rabbit out of a hat during their Budget statements – something to delight their own MPs and leave the opposition feeling outmanoeuvred. Such has been the atmosphere of doom and gloom generated by Rachel Reeves in advance of hers that there is a temptation to envisage her plonking a boiled bunny on the Commons despatch box and exclaiming: ‘It’s Halloween tomorrow, so grab a load of that!’ And yet Ms Reeves will surely at least attempt to conjure up the vista of some sunlit economic uplands after four months of exaggerated complaints about the financial inheritance passed down by the Tories. Better resourcing of ‘Our NHS’

Monday

James Heale

Budget week: Labour braced for backlash

13 min listen

It’s Budget week (finally)! How this week goes will set the tone for Labour’s first year in office. It’s fair to say that expectations are relatively low – with the Prime Minister himself warning of ‘painful decisions’ ahead. We know a lot of what will likely be included and Treasury sources are keen to play down talk of any Budget rabbits – suggesting a mix of the measures currently being discussed in the media. So what should we expect? And can Labour ride out the week unscathed? Also on the podcast, Labour have suspended the whip for Mike Amesbury, MP for Runcorn and Helsby, after he appeared to threaten a

Friday

James Heale

Labour’s ‘working people’ muddle

11 min listen

Who exactly are ‘working people’? The Labour party’s use of this phrase during the election raised questions over who they will really be levying taxes upon. With less than a week to go until the Budget, Labour in government is now again struggling to give a clear definition of what they mean. James Heale talks to Katy Balls and Kate Andrews. Produced by Cindy Yu.

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Budget leaks, prisoners released and Israel kills Hamas leader

Home Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, was expected to freeze tax thresholds in the Budget on 30 October, to swell government income as more working people were brought into higher tax bands. Before Labour formed a government, she had said that the Conservatives, by freezing tax thresholds, were ‘picking the pockets of working people’. Weeks of speculation on the Budget were encouraged by leaks and by constant questioning of ministers about how Labour would keep to its manifesto undertaking not to raise taxes on ‘working people’ by increasing income tax, national insurance or VAT. The International Monetary Fund raised its growth forecast for the United Kingdom to 1.1

Wednesday

Martin Vander Weyer

Wahed’s alarming Tube adverts

As the interminable Budget wait goes on, so does the trawl through the Chancellor’s bin bags. I refer to the old tabloid method of digging in celebrities’ dustbins for evidence of depravity or scandal; in Rachel Reeves’s case, that would mean piecing together shredded Treasury analyses on all the various tax wheezes floated since July. One curry-smeared paper no doubt addresses the pros and cons of an inheritance raid on ‘aristocrats and landowners’; beneath the Red Bull cans and pizza crusts, might there be another headed ‘Clawbacks on Enterprise Investment Scheme’? Not that there have been substantive rumours, mind you. But that’s rather the point: having had so many draft

Sunday

James Kirkup

Jeremy Hunt’s fantasy Budget

As Rachel Reeves prepares what is potentially the most difficult Budget in a generation, a question occurs: what if the Conservatives had, somehow, won the election? Historians hate counterfactuals, considering them unhelpful parlour-games. Personally, I enjoy a good ‘what if’ – not least because they can help put current political events in context. In that spirit, I’m pleased to present here the October 2024 Budget speech that Chancellor Jeremy Hunt might give in a parallel universe where the Conservatives remained in office after the election. As well a Budget address, this is also my resignation speech ‘Madam Deputy Speaker, it gives me no great pleasure to present this Budget statement

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Labour budget: are we heading for austerity?

23 min listen

Labour’s first Budget in 14 years will be delivered at the end of the month. The Prime Minister and Chancellor have already been warning that the public isn’t going to like what’s in it. But how will the Budget affect people? Will Labour break its manifesto commitment not to tax working people? And is it really true that things have to get worse before they get better? Kate Andrews is joined by Paul Mason, journalist at The New European. Join Freddy Gray a special live recording of Americano on Thursday 24 October. You can buy tickets at www.spectator.co.uk/electionspecial. 

Thursday

William Moore

Reeves’s gambit, a debate on assisted dying & queer life in postwar Britain

52 min listen

This week: the Chancellor’s Budget dilemma. ‘As a former championship chess player, Rachel Reeves must know that the first few moves can be some of the most important of the game,’ writes Rupert Harrison – former chief of staff to George Osborne – for the cover of the magazine this week. But, he says, the truth is that she has played herself into a corner ahead of this month’s Budget, with her room for manoeuvre dramatically limited by a series of rash decisions. Her biggest problem is that she has repeatedly ruled out increases in income tax, national insurance and VAT. So which taxes will rise, given that the easy

Matthew Lynn

Let’s see if ‘Patriotic Millionaires’ really want more tax

Dubai, Italy or perhaps the Bahamas? Many multi-millionaires are discussing where they should flee to as the Rachel Reeves prepares to raid their bank accounts in the ‘Horror Budget’ scheduled for the end of this month. But not, as it turns out, Patriotic Millionaires, the group that campaigns tirelessly for higher taxes on the rich. Its members want Reeves to take more of their money. The papers are dominated by reports of wealthy entrepreneurs, and the few remaining non-doms, securing a bolt hole somewhere where Reeves will not be able to reach them, but Patriotic Millionaires has a very different message. A report out today, written by IPPR (a think

Tuesday

Oscar Edmondson

National Insurance: Starmer’s first big U-turn?

14 min listen

The Budget is not due for a fortnight, yet with every day that passes its contents seem to become clearer. This morning Keir Starmer gave an interview to the BBC where he twice refused to rule out a rise in employer’s national insurance contributions in the Budget. Instead, he repeatedly stressed that Labour’s manifesto promise was specifically that it would ‘not raise taxes on working people’. Can Rachel Reeves afford a national insurance hike?  Oscar Edmondson speaks to Katy Balls and Michael Gove.  Produced by Oscar Edmondson. 

Thursday

James Heale

The ‘Green Budget’ could leave Rachel Reeves red-faced

16 min listen

The Institute for Fiscal Studies has published its yearly Green Budget, weeks ahead of Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s first fiscal event. It’s grim reading, for both the government and the public. For Labour to make good on its promise to avoid ‘austerity’, taxes are going to need to go up significantly: by £25 billion, the IFS’s reports, and that’s just to ‘keep spending rising with national income.’ Can Reeves square the circle?  James Heale speaks to Katy Balls and Kate Andrews.  Produced by Oscar Edmondson. 

Saturday

Fraser Nelson

Coffee House Shots live: the Starmer supremacy

47 min listen

Join Fraser Nelson, Katy Balls and Kate Andrews, along with special guest Jonathan Ashworth, for a live edition of Coffee House Shots recorded earlier this week. They dissect the first few weeks of the new Labour government and look ahead to the policies autumn, and the budget, might bring. Having surprisingly lost his seat at the election, how blunt will Ashworth be? The team also answer a range of audience questions, including: how big of a welfare crisis is the government facing? Would – and should – they reform the NHS? And could the challenge Reform UK poses to traditional parties continue to grow?  Produced by Patrick Gibbons and Megan McElroy. 

Friday

Katy Balls

Labour’s ‘£20 billion black hole’ strategy

17 min listen

The Chancellor Rachel Reeves is expected to give a statement to Parliament on Monday outlining the state of public finances, including a ‘£20 billion black hole’. James Heale talks to Katy Balls and Kate Andrews about the strategy behind this: will this speech lay the ground work for the Autumn budget? How new are these economic issues? And, with the Conservatives embarking on a long leadership election, will Labour have a free rein for their plans?  Produced by Patrick Gibbons.

Wednesday

Oscar Edmondson

We need to talk about Truss

15 min listen

Liz Truss continues to haunt Rishi Sunak. Labour leader Keir Starmer took aim at her recent exploits at CPAC in the US during prime minister’s questions today. Starmer called on the prime minister to remove the whip after Truss claimed that her premiership was sabotaged by the ‘deep state’. What’s Truss up to this time?  Also on the podcast, chancellor Jeremy Hunt will deliver his budget next week. We expect that he will have made his final decision on the March 6th budget by the end of the week. What do we know so far?  Oscar Edmondson speaks to Katy Balls and Kate Andrews.  Produced by Oscar Edmondson.