Howie Sel

Thatcher gave council tenants the right to own their homes. Blair and Brown then had 13 years to build replacements. They failed. Funny how Labour's history of council housing always seems to skip the years when @UKLabour was actually in charge.

Healey Promised Breathing Space. The IFS Says He Delivered A Lost Decade John Healey's Budget came with a slogan, "breathing space now, fresh hope for the future." Judge it by the Chancellor's own measures. The IFS calculates that the package saves the average family £140 by next July. Over the same period, energy and fuel costs are expected to rise by £400. Subtract one from the other and £260 still lands on the household budget. Relief that covers a third of the bill is a discount on the damage. The slogan promised hope. The projection delivers a lost decade. Disposable income for the typical family will grow by about 2 per cent across the 2020s, the weakest of any decade since comparable records began in the 1950s. By 2029, families will have barely more spending power than in 2019. Helen Miller, the IFS director, says no temporary cost of living package can fix that, and the Budget offered nothing else. A VAT cut on electricity and £100 for council tax bands A to D were never going to bend a trend line a decade long. Then there is the headroom. Healey told the Commons he had left £15bn of room against his fiscal rules in 2029/30. The same IFS review identifies a £28bn hole in his spending plans, which would require deep cuts to some departments, cuts Miller doubts this government will make. A margin of safety that depends on reductions nobody expects to be delivered is not a margin. Britain has heard this arithmetic before, from his predecessor, and it did not survive contact with the forecasts. The £14bn rise in debt interest this year shows how quickly it can move. Kemi Badenoch had the measure of it in the chamber, dismissing the package as "4p off gherkins." Businesses were less theatrical and no more generous. Lord Cruddas of CMC Markets called the Budget "pretty useless" against rising bond yields. The Resolution Foundation, hardly a Conservative outpost, found it small beside the scale of the challenge. None of them described a Chancellor confronting the country's central problem, which is an economy that does not grow fast enough to pay for what the state promises. That failure belongs to Andy Burnham as much as to his Chancellor. He took office pledging to ease the squeeze on family finances. His first Budget leaves families facing a lost decade, pushes the hard choices beyond the next election, and bets the public finances on forecasts improving in time. Gilt investors, who have watched this approach before, will price the bet accordingly. Two questions need answering from Downing Street. Which departments will absorb the £28bn of cuts the plans imply, and will the Prime Minister name them before the next election? And if a family is still £260 worse off this winter after the Budget's help, what was the breathing space for? Andy Burnham and John Healey. One promised economic renewal, the other promised breathing space. Britain's families are still waiting for either.

The Chancellor's approach to beer is remarkably similar to his approach to the economy. Sink it in record time.

Brilliant Badenoch, Four Pence Off Gherkins and a Chancellor Left Exposed John Healey stood up today promising "breathing space now, fresh hope for the future." When Kemi Badenoch rose to respond, she dismantled the claim with a single line: this is a budget for getting by, not for getting on. In eleven words, she exposed what fifty minutes of Treasury rhetoric had tried to obscure. A government managing decline and calling it relief. Badenoch's sharpest moment was also her simplest. Healey had announced £100 energy payments, an extension of the electricity VAT cut, and business rates relief, dressed as a serious response to household pressure. Badenoch's verdict: "Instead, we got 4p off gherkins." The line lands because it exposes the absurdity. A country facing diesel at £2 a litre and gas storage at a third full heading into winter was offered a rounding error and told to be grateful. Badenoch did not need to shout to make the gap visible. She simply held the promise next to the policy and let the distance speak. She was equally precise on the fiscal claims underneath the theatre. Healey insisted his Budget met the government's own fiscal rules and left £15 billion of headroom by 2029/30, the same confident arithmetic his predecessor Reeves offered before her own numbers moved against her. Badenoch was unimpressed, and rightly so. Headroom quoted four years out, in a Budget delivered against a backdrop of £14 billion in additional forecast debt interest this year alone, is not a cushion. It is a hope dressed up as a forecast, and Badenoch's refusal to accept it at face value was the correct instinct from an opposition that has watched this exact promise fail once already under this government. Her challenge on enterprise was the one Healey will find hardest to answer honestly. He pointed to new money through the National Wealth Fund and the British Business Bank, business rates changes, and tax incentives for company founders, and called it a plan to unleash British enterprise. Badenoch's response cut straight through the announcement to the arithmetic underneath it: none of it touches the underlying costs already crushing employers. A tax incentive for founders means little to a business still absorbing last year's National Insurance rise, this year's minimum wage increase, and a wholesale energy bill that has doubled since the Iran crisis began. You cannot unleash enterprise with one hand while taxing its costs with the other, and Badenoch was the only person in the chamber prepared to say so plainly. Badenoch also went after breathing space itself as a concept, asking how much room Britain genuinely has left when borrowing costs, debt interest and the overall tax burden are all moving in the same direction at once. It is the right question, because breathing space implies slack somewhere in the system, and nothing in Healey's own figures suggests any exists. A Chancellor claiming headroom while debt interest rises by £14 billion in a single year is not managing a surplus of room. He is managing its absence, and hoping nobody checks the working. What made the performance outstanding was its discipline. Badenoch did not need to invent a crisis or raise her voice to find one. Sharp, witty, and relentlessly on point, she read Healey's own numbers back to him and let the contradiction do the damage itself. A government promising fresh hope, offering 4p off gherkins, and calling £15 billion of headroom security rather than wishful thinking has handed the opposition leader everything she needs to make the case against it. Badenoch made that case, and made it look easy.