This sly Budget will hurt natural Tories

FOR those who, like this newspaper, worry that trust in British politicians is at an all-time low, Wednesday’s Budget was another bad day.

Indeed, Chancellor Philip Hammond’s financial statement offered an insight into why our political classes are held in such poor regard by the public.

Cracking jokes at the despatch box, he blithely announced a hike in National Insurance for the self-employed which drove a coach and horses through a promise which featured not once but four times in the Conservative Party’s 2015 election manifesto.

While he may have had an intellectually coherent case for this measure, what worries the Mail is that he seemed blithely unaware that he was penalising a section of the workforce who arguably form the Conservatives’ most loyal supporters. However you slice the cake, this was a public relations disaster.

It was a disaster compounded by his pedantic sophistry that the manifesto vow applied only to Class 1 National Insurance contributions and not those in Class 4 he was hiking.

Yes, the Mail accepts there may be a logic to bringing closer together the rates paid by the employed and self-employed, especially given abuse by wealthy lawyers and bankers. But politics is not about logic, it is about perception. It is also about trust.

And he did himself no favours by presenting this and several other measures in a sly and disingenuous way.

He could have been honest and said that 2.4million self-employed people will pay £240 a year more in National Insurance – not the ‘average’ 60p a day he claimed.

He could have acknowledged that of those, many work long hours but, unlike company staff, do not receive holiday pay or maternity and childcare benefits. To penalise them in this way seems horribly unfair.

But this disingenuousness did not stop at National Insurance.

He fudged a 35p rise in the price of a packet of cigarettes and he glossed over the fact that countless pensioners’ share portfolios would be hit by a £3,000 cut to the tax-free allowance on dividend payouts.

Wouldn’t it simply have been better to be honest with the public?