Why a do little budget puts our country in peril - Brian Monteith

There has been a great deal of talk about tomorrow’s Budget changing doing very little so the Prime Minister can continue conducting optimistic mood music before asking the country for a mandate, probably at next year’s May council elections. I care not when the prime minister goes to the country as I do not under any foreseeable circumstances expect to be giving him my vote. I do, however, care about the state of the economy, in particular the public finances, and how that impacts upon the daily lives of people from their health to their safety, from their education to their opportunities in fulfilling their potential.

Politicians who put themselves or their party first do the public a disservice, for it is only when the economy is liberated from their vested interests that prosperity has the best chance of taking root. Less is more, and the less politicians meddle in the economy the more we can trust them to make the decisions that affect us – such as the security of the nation and enforcement of justice in our land. Let us recall the Prime Minister has set himself some benchmarks against which he should be judged.

Politicians are apt to do this as if they will not be held to account when the numbers come in – think Nicola Sturgeon putting education standards as her top priority against which she should be judged. Burnham’s Makerfield Test that tells us what is unacceptable to the people of Makerfield is for him a guide to what he should not do to Britain. He has also promised to spread good growth in every postcode across the land. A tall ambition or loose words.

We shall see. I don’t expect Chancellor John Healey or Dr Feelgood Burnham to immediately put right all the mistakes of Rachel Reeves and Keir Starmer – who left the country in a worse state than they found it – but we do need to hear that both understand the most basic aspects of economics. The first of these is the government at every level must raise more tax revenues than the money it spends. We now have an official national debt of over £3 trillion.

Add the off-balance-sheet liabilities of £8.6bn, such as unfunded public sector pensions, and the total rises to £11.7tn. The national debt clock is climbing by an astonishing £4,270 every second or £256,200 every minute. I started writing about this in the Scotsman back in 2009; some 17 years later no government has properly tackled it. I had no grandchildren back then, now I have six and it will be they and their generation who will pay for the profligacy of the established parties in government.

To reduce the national debt requires a government to produce an annual surplus. Given the size of the UK’s interest payments has reached £10.9bn a month and taxes already account for 47 per cent of the economy, reducing spending is going to have more impact in moving towards a surplus than raising taxes that produce diminishing returns can. Yet I have no doubt that there will be more sweeteners to traditional Labour supporting groups while suggesting tempting subsidies to floating voters about the costs of living.

There is, I repeat no money – so the losers will be those whom Labour thinks we shall happily accept can bear more taxes – so long as it is not us. Cartoon baddies such as the banks, the “rich”, gamblers and those businesses who pay taxes we do not understand. All despite us receiving repeated reports of millionaires and billionaires taking their wealth and corresponding tax payments with them overseas, costing the treasury tens of billions each year.

We have a government supposedly for the workers presiding over an inexorable growth of unemployment, especially for those under twenty-five. We have heard betting organisations such as PaddyPower announce 1,400 redundancies (15 per cent of its workforce) while Barclays Bank has cut 5,000 staff from its payroll. We should not be surprised because Labour has made the cost of hiring more expensive just when employers are considering AI solutions as an alternative.

The Prime Minister’s problem is not that he wants to go back to the future but that he wants to go forward into the past. A time of unreliable Morris Maestros (especially those built on a Friday), of freezing British Rail carriages with curled up sandwiches in the buffet car and Palmolive soap in out of service toilets. A time when disruption from strikes was the default and applying for a job required a union card. The music and football was great, but the fashions, foods and public services were embarrassing.

John Healey resigned as Defence Secretary because Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves of provided inadequate funding for national defence. It opened the Downing Street gates for Andrew Burnham’s Palace coup. Tomorrow, I expect Healey to make smoke and use semaphores to suggest he has found some defence funding, but if he does it will be illusory, inadequate and possibly even illegitimate. It will not even touch the sides of the existential threat the country now faces at a time of weakening alliances when Labour’s foreign policy posture is to insult those whom we depend on for muscle and intelligence.

Meanwhile our ruling class talk as if new benefits can be afforded and existing ones expanded. It will all count for nothing when our telecoms cables are cut, our utilities go dark and our industries are hacked to a standstill. We can then be blackmailed into submission. This budget should not be about preparing for an election; it should be about preparing to defend our country, or what there is left of it that still works. Brian Monteith is a former member of the Scottish and European Parliaments and senior advisor to the Tax Reform Council