Politics

Chris McLaughlin: In Boris Johnson's Budget the poorest are the biggest losers


So, Boris has got it done. He’s performed the final rites for austerity, exorcised Thatcherism and ushered in a new model Tory Party.

It may be a party based on the ­economic principles of, er, the Labour Party. But oh how the Tory MPs cheered the transformative Budget that defined the end of an era.

Maggie must be spinning.

Whatever the outcome of the ­spending splurge, Britain now has a Prime Minister and a Government committed to the economic opposite of what the Tories have stood for in most people’s living memory.

Boris has junked his party’s own past, an admission of failure.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Chancellor Rishi Sunak

Instead he and his Chancellor Rishi “Risky” Sunak have set a course to rebuild what the Tories have spent so many years destroying.

Suddenly, it’s year zero for the Tories, as though the past never happened.

There’s cash for everything – planes, trains, roads, schools, the homeless, booze and the NHS.

If this surrender Budget had been delivered by a Labour Chancellor there would have been howls from the Tory benches about a Marxist takeover.

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But this was no Labour Budget, let alone a shift to some quasi-socialist agenda.

In Boris’s shiny, sunny ­uplands the poorest ten ­per cent of the population ­remain the biggest losers, social care is neglected and local ­government faces more cuts while being given more responsibilities.

Gaping holes ­remain over climate change and an unfair and ­dysfunctional welfare system remains untouched. Austerity may be dead but its effects live on.

The NHS and public services would be far better prepared to fight the coronavirus if they had not been cut to the bone.

The Budget cash for health goes nowhere near even filling the hole in funding excavated by the Tories in a decade of ­swingeing real cuts. The Government promises “millions if not ­billions” and “whatever it takes” for the NHS. We’ll see what comes of that.

Not even a blank cheque would be enough to fill the hole left after ten years of cuts.

Sustained underfunding and understaffing has resulted in the loss of 17,000 beds, a shortage of 100,000 staff and cuts in ambulances.

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Last week 442,675 calls were made to NHS 111, 120,000 more than the same period last year and 80,000 more than the week before. Occupation of acute and general beds was at 93.9 per cent.

The safe limit is 85 per cent. It is unclear what principles, of justice and fairness for example, underpin Boris’s promised land beyond the ­retention of power. But it presents a fundamental challenge to Labour.

It won’t be good enough for the new leadership to fight on the old ground. Demolishing Boris’s right to claim the new ground must be the primary aim.

For that, unity will be the most ­important and essential weapon.

It’s a new landscape. And it will be a hard battle to claim it anew.





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