Budget gives Labour a purpose- Taxes to help the poor

The ending of the two child benefit cap is welcome. It is wrong to visit the sins of parents onto their children. The state is then forcing those children to grow up at a disadvantage – a disadvantage that, in return, the state ends up paying for in terms of more benefits and more health issues, and a loss of potential.

But it is expensive: £2.3bn-a-year, which is why the pragmatic Keir Starmer government did not initially commit to it.

There are other signs that the Labour government is finding its causes: there are lifestyle taxes on gambling and sugary drinks to nudge people in the right direction; there is talk of every school being equipped with a library, of playgrounds being improved; there is £150 off fuel bills to counter the cost-of-living crisis; there is continued investment in the NHS. These are proper Labour measures.

But they are expensive. Very expensive. It is not just millionaires in mansions who are going to be hit: 800,000 people are going to start paying Income Tax; 900,000 are going to move into the higher rate. Those who pay into pensions, those who drive electric cars, those who save are all going to pay more.

That’s where the political dividing lines are going to be: tax versus spend. And trust, because Rachel Reeves in her first tax-raising Budget said she would not be coming back for more. Yet she has. Big style.

However, perhaps more than the taxes and the spending, this Budget will be remembered for its chaos.

There have been weeks of leaks and U-turns, of kite-flyings and pitch-rollings, of a fiscal fandango of this being in, that being out and the whole country being shaken about.

This seems to have paralysed the local property market and made the government look to be in fear of the country, the commentators and its own backbenchers.

Astoundingly, this continued right up until the last minute when the Office of Budget Responsibility accidentally leaked the whole shooting match.

It was not the government’s fault, but it gives the impression that, on top of everything else, this is a government at the mercy of events, of a government which has even run out of luck, and that is so difficult to recover from. A sense of purpose, though, is a start.