Brexit puts bite on Phil’s Budget bribes

CONTINUITY Chancellor Philip Hammond is sustaining, not ending, self-defeating Tory austerity. There’ll be no radical incomeboosting, public service-reviving, growth-triggering investment from a Treasury hawk who admits Brexit undermines today’s Budget box of tricks.

Multi-millionaire property developer Spreadsheet Phil is an architect of a crushing austerity which owes far more to a Conservative ideology of shrinking the public realm than financial necessity.

When even richer Right-wing Tories such as Brexit speculator Jacob ReesMogg accuse him of soft pedalling on Europe by refusing to trumpet a no-deal crash – that would be bad for Britain if potentially good for a Tory slicker with international money deals – it smacks of an uncivil war in an unruly governing party eating itself alive.

What we won’t see from Hammond is the pay rise this country needs because average wages are still worth £13 a week less in real terms than they were 10 years ago.

Instead he threatens deeper cuts for nurses, teachers, coppers and firefighters outside London and South East England, while universal credit deepens poverty for people both in and out of work.

Hammond is politically opposed to reversing cuts in the pipeline. Theresa May clodhopping back from spin at this month’s Tory conference in Birmingham about ending austerity requires us all to check Hammond’s figures on borrowing and debt against past promises.

The Tories’ pledges to balance the books by 2015 were fantasy economics – it’ll be sometime in the next decade.

We now have the lowest growth of any major European economy, the longest wage squeeze since Napoleonic times and crippled services including an ailing NHS.

It adds up to an eight-year record of painful failure. Hammond’s Labour shadow John McDonnell is finally winning the big arguments and we can gauge the continuity Chancellor’s desperation from the flood of Treasury press releases announcing cash for everything from high streets and pot holes to mental health and trees. Back in 1947, Labour Chancellor Hugh Dalton was forced to resign for whispering to the Star evening newspaper in London that he was poised to slap a penny on beer. Hammond is straining to sound like Santa when he’s Scrooge. It is spin, not a significant change in substance.