Rachel Reeves’s first budget on 30 October is still nine weeks away. But already she’s facing a political onslaught on two fronts.
Tories claim the fiscal event will be a Halloween horror for the middle classes and “Middle England”, with rumoured rises in inheritance tax and capital gains tax.
And the chancellor also faces a backbench backlash from Labour MPs over her axing of winter fuel payments of up to £300 for all but the most hard-up pensioners.
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But the woman who sees herself as an “iron chancellor” shows no sign of bowing to pressure from her critics on either controversy. Yet.
The day after Sir Keir Starmer’s warning that the budget would be “painful” – “I never promised you a rose garden,” said one headline – she refused three times to rule out the expected tax rises.
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In a tetchy interview during a visit to Scotland, the exchange went like this:
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“Can you rule out raising inheritance tax and raising capital gains in the budget?”
“I’m not going to write a budget two months ahead of delivering it.”
“Can you rule it out?”
“We’re going to have to make a series of difficult decisions…”
“So you can’t rule it out?”
“I’ll set out the budget on 30 October.”
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Responding to that interview, the former Tory chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, claimed: “Labour promised over 50 times in the election they would not raise people’s taxes and now they are laying the ground to do just that.”
Well, to be fair, the only tax rises Sir Keir and Ms Reeves explicitly ruled out were on income tax, VAT and national insurance – they dodged questions during the campaign on inheritance tax and capital gains tax.
But it’s not just on tax rises that the Conservatives – and many Labour MPs as well – are poised to mount an attack on the chancellor when MPs return to Westminster next week.
Rishi Sunak – remember him? – has served notice that the Tory opposition will attempt to force a Commons vote to cancel the winter fuel payment cut.
And while the government will use every tactic they can to try to avoid a vote, there’s fury on the Labour backbenches – and not just among the “usual suspects” on the hard left.
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What both these rows have in common, of course, is that the prime minister and chancellor blame the £22bn “black hole” in the nation’s finances they claim they’ve inherited from the Tories.
“We were left a £22bn black hole for this year… and that was spending covered up by the previous Conservative government,” Ms Reeves said – yet again – in her fractious Glasgow interview.
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But while a YouGov poll last week suggested that voters might tolerate tax hikes that hit the rich, such as inheritance tax and capital gains tax, taking the winter fuel allowance off up to 10 million pensioners is starting to look like a big political blunder.
Not only does Ms Reeves see herself as Labour’s “iron chancellor” in the Gordon Brown mould, but it’s claimed she even had a framed photo of chancellor Brown on her wall when she was a student in the late 1990s.
And it was Mr Brown, let’s not forget, who introduced the winter fuel allowance in 1997. Since then, seven successive Tory chancellors, from George Osborne to Jeremy Hunt, kept it, even in the Conservatives’ austerity years.
But Ms Reeves would do well to heed the lessons from Mr Brown’s own blunder in 1999 when he increased the state pension by a derisory 75p and was forced into a humiliating U-turn.
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After Sir Keir’s “short-term pain for long-term-good” appeal this week, Labour’s chief cheerleader in Fleet Street, the Daily Mirror, declared in its leader column: “It’s time for a fuel U-turn.”
Mirror columnist Kevin Maguire revealed the paper’s postbag was “bulging” and wrote: “This is a moment for Starmer and Reeves to heed Denis Healey’s first law of politics, which was for those in a hole to stop digging.”
So what’s the lesson, then, for the chancellor and prime minister from the twin assault she’s facing, on tax and fuel bills?
It’s surely that the evidence from polls and postbags is the public will put up with some tax rises for the better off in so-called “Middle England”.
But tales of freezing pensioners this Christmas won’t go down well with voters. An iron chancellor is one thing. But not a Scrooge chancellor.
