Marina Hyde, The Guardian.
Labour can proudly say this was a budget for working people – that is, if your job happens to be prime minister.
Thanks to Labour’s incredible Black Friday deal, breaking manifesto policies is buy-one-get-one-free. As part of its all-promises-must-go drive, it’s ditching its flagship policy giving the right to claim unfair dismissal from day one of employment. Employers will now have up to six months to summarily sack workers who don’t pan out – unless they’re the government, in which case people have to wait till 2029.
The employment rights bill was drawn up and championed by Angela Rayner, who resigned in September following a series of discoveries about her tax affairs. Weird to think that Rayner could easily have been in the I’m a Celebrity camp right now. The former deputy PM reportedly got pretty far along in her discussions with ITV in terms of booking a spot on the current series of the fauna-testicle-based format, and could at this very moment have been giving us her Queen Over the Water/Queen in the Jungle Shower for 80 minutes of primetime a night. But in the end, Rayner seems to have concluded – or had it concluded for her – that there wouldn’t be a way back to frontline politics if she took that particular leave of absence.
Such are the sliding-doors moments in our very serious politics. Who’s to say for sure, but maybe Rayner will now be thinking that declining the ostrich anus was the right call as she does the House of Commons tearoom trial over the coming days. According to briefings, she’ll be taking soundings from the various malcontents who seemingly run the party from the backbenches, who got most of what they wanted in the budget this week, and who still see themselves as victims of something or other. Arguably, Labour backbenchers should count their blessings. Unlike most of the rest of the country, they have guaranteed jobs for the next few years, unless they sexually harass a junior staff member or whatever. And, on the parliamentary standards form book, even if they do. In recent times, employment rights for MPs seem all too frequently to have been modelled on those of medieval feudal lords.
Anyway, whichever way you slice it, the government is back in a familiar place: arguing about whether it did or didn’t break a manifesto commitment, just as it has spent the past few days doing over its tax-raising budget. It is also arguing about whether or not it was lying on Monday when it insisted it wasn’t going to water the employment rights bill down, even though it was meeting business leaders and unions on that same day to discuss doing just that.
First out to defend all this hokey cokey was business secretary Peter Kyle, who always comes off as a man playing a businessman in a play about business. According to Kyle, the pledge ditch doesn’t break the manifesto because “the manifesto committed us to finding compromise”. Did it though? By chance I have the document in front of me on my desk – they are always worth hanging on to, I find – and there is precisely nothing about compromise in it as far as I can see. Maybe there was a limited-edition manifesto with bonus material? Or maybe talking about all this is better than talking about our absent friend – growth.
And so to Rachel Reeves’s budget. From almost the minute she took office, no one seems to have been more surprised by economic realities than the chancellor. OK – with the possible exception of the prime minister. Remember that during last year’s general election campaign, Keir Starmer went absolutely nuts at Rishi Sunak for suggesting that Labour would, in fact, need to raise taxes to pay for all the things it said it was buying. Sunak was lying, insisted the Labour leader, and had seriously breached the ministerial code by doing so. “He knew very well what he was doing,” Starmer fumed to the cameras back then. “He lied about our plans. And that is a true test of character. As we go to the polls it is important for voters to know about the character of the two individuals who want to be prime minister.” Mate, they know a lot more now.
In fact, blissful ignorance is very much off the menu all round. Spool forward to the immediate aftermath of this latest budget, and Helen Miller, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), said: “Before this budget, the UK was faced with lacklustre economic growth, stagnating living standards, and a dizzying array of fiscal pressures. The same is still true after this budget.” The tax burden that went up by £40bn last November went up a further £26bn this week – and the IFS was crystal clear that rises in national insurance in the budget did represent a manifesto breach. A moment for reflection in Downing Street? Not so’s you’d notice. When the Conservatives were in power, Labour could never stop talking about the IFS, refusing to even name it without prefixing it with its epithet “the trusted”. Now, strangely, it doesn’t want to talk about the IFS at all.
As for what the upshot of all this will be, it was great to learn today that the budget’s apparently overriding aim – not to offend Labour backbenchers – has been judged sufficiently successful in that regard thus far to keep Starmer’s job safe till after the May elections. You’ve heard of a budget for jobs. Sadly, we can’t have that. What we seem to have had instead is a budget for job: one in particular. Unfair dismissal may be in the headlines now; fair dismissal is likely to be more of a preoccupation in the coming months.
