‘Steady as she goes’ UK budget fuels talk that bigger changes are in the wings
“Is that it?” an indignant Tory leader Kemi Badenoch asked after the inaugural budget speech on Wednesday of Labour’s new chancellor of the exchequer, John Healey. His boss, UK prime minister Andy Burnham, rose to power over the summer with a near-revolutionary promise to reverse 40 years of right-wing economic orthodoxy. Yet his chancellor’s first big fiscal set-piece was a studied exercise in treading water, more notable for what it didn’t do than what it did. It included modest £100 cash rebates to council tax payers and VAT cuts on electricity, but there was no mention of how to cap galloping welfare spending, which is predicted to rise by more than £100 billion annually within the next five years. In his low-key house of commons speech, Healey blamed the inflationary pressures of US president Donald Trump’s war in Iran for limiting his fiscal options. Nancy Pelosi, the former Democratic congressional…