The Chancellor’s spending plans for the next decade just don’t add up, says Fleet Street Fox. Clearly, a maths lesson is in order
There are two things I learned in maths at school: the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the square on the other two sides, and how to write my name in numerals on a calculator.
You may think that’s not much to show for 11 years of effort in trying to put numbers into a brain that only ate words. But knowing how triangles work is a damned useful thing when looking at the world and working out where it’s gone wrong. And the more I see of her, the more it looks like Rachel Reeves’ triangle expertise starts and ends with knowing it’ll go ‘ting’ if you hit it with a teaspoon.
For those who read only headlines, the first Chancellor to not have the same colour hair from one day to the next has announced £113bn of investment, building back what’s been destroyed, restoring people’s faith in Labour, and blah de blah blah. Few headlines have reported the Tory view, but that’s understandable: it’s hard to hear what they say when people have their head that far up their own rancid fundament.
At this point a columnist might attempt to pick apart a Chancellor’s sums, perhaps quote a great economist. But to me Keynes is what you call interns from Buckinghamshire, and my calculator always seems to spell 315005. The brutal truth is she hasn’t bothered with any sums. She’s just drawn a lovely picture of an inexplicable future, and she might as well have told us there’d be marmalade custard and sausage ice cream too.
A chancellor’s spending review doesn’t have the same restraints as a Budget, so she’s managed to get away with the fiscal equivalent of an architect’s drawing of how the town centre will look after it’s pedestrianised, all springtime pavement cafes and leafy trees and children playing. But in reality, it’s still West Bromwich, the business died for lack of traffic, and everyone grew up living too close to the paint factory.
So when Rachel’s sunny little plan says HM Revenue and Customs will save 13.1% of its budget through “AI and automation”, what will happen is that even less effort will be made to go after tax dodgers, and the process of small business owners and the self-employed getting shafted annually will be commentated by a chatbot. The sort of blithely dysfunctional customer service that will leave you actually pining for a keypad options menu, and a recipe for cock-ups.
Rachel said departmental budgets will grow by an average of 2.3%, aside from all those which will be cut. The NHS will get an extra £29billion, and she’ll promptly take a chunk back in employer National Insurance contributions for 1.3m staff, which she’ll then say she’s ‘reinvesting’ in the NHS. Even spotting some of that cash as it whizzes around in theoretical space and time will be like trying to catch a quark in your hands in the Large Hadron Collider.
Then she had the brass neck to call it “a record cash investment in our NHS, increasing real-terms, day-to-day spending by 3%”. Except under Tony Blair it increased by £60bn, over the entire lifetime of the NHS it’s been 4% a year, and in those days we could actually see it.
No mention of dentists, not a sniff of social care. Defence spending has squeaked up merely by changing what you count as ‘defence’, and is already too low for what the rest of NATO wants. Disabled people rendered more disabled, and less able to work, by a programme of punishing them into work rather than giving bosses an incentive to hire them.
A huge £39bn for ‘affordable’ housing that probably won’t be, with a construction industry 250,000 people short of actually being able to build them. A u-turn on winter fuel payments because of a changed economic outlook when the economic outlook has actually got worse. And hooray, a triumph for the Mirror’s campaign to extend free school meals to every family on Universal Credit.
Except – have you seen a school meal recently? We’re talking damp pizza, cold gravy, the cheapest of miserable chickens that even Donald Trump would feel guilty about selling to us. All this hoo-hah about how a hot meal improves learning and life chances, and nary a thought about how reheated, reformed offcuts from the cheapest bidder for the off-site catering contract can possibly qualify as food. You’d get more nutrition from licking the playground. If it weren’t so far beneath her, school catering could be Michelle Mone’s next big wheeze.
And the asylum seekers. The ones who can’t work, because that right was taken away last time Labour were in power and saw votes in naked racism. The homeless who can’t have social housing, because the Tories sold it all and Angela Rayner bought as much as she could. The people who get £49 a week to feed, heat, and clothe themselves, while living in ‘hotels’ six to a room or detention centres crawling with cockroaches, while the owners bill the taxpayer five star rates.
Well, no more hotels for them! Can it be coincidence, I wonder, that on the same day it was announced rough sleeping would be decriminalised? No need to house them, and no need to sweep them up and put them in the jails we don’t have. Heaven forfend anyone’d have a good idea, like allowing them to work and pay taxes, so they could house themselves, integrate, and everyone benefits. In Rachelworld, all the asylum seekers are going to just disappear – pouf – as the world plummets headfirst into climate crisis and authoritarianism.
I can’t even bear to discuss the environmental unfriendliness of nuclear waste, or the carbon footprint of a modular reactor and everything that goes into it. Suffice it to say, even Swampy might be converted to burn coal instead, and by the time that idea’s toxic half-life has decayed to a bearable level we STILL won’t have those pavement cafes.
The one good bit of news in the spending review is that we can all rejoice, for the only way Rachel could square all this is by locating and stripping the fabled magic money tree. But all she has to show for it is promises that don’t add up, and won’t be enough to save her from being a convenient firee for a Prime Minister who, not long from now, will want to blame someone else for the economy that tanked for two reasons he wouldn’t admit.
Now class, what do you get if you triangulate all the above, and add up the squares of Brexit and employers National Insurance contributions? 707. Put that upside down in your calculator and smoke it.