It’s my food bank today and I have very exciting news for the desperate and hungry people who will be coming to see us. Chancellor Jeremy C…Hunt has delivered his first budget and it’s a game changer when it comes to food poverty. Let’s go through a few of the headlines:
- Energy bills will be frozen at a mere £2500 per year until June
- The lifetime limit on tax-free pensions savings will be abolished
- The annual tax-free pension allowance will rise to £60,000
- The sick, disabled and carers will increasingly be forced off benefits
- Defence spending will increase by by £11bn over the next five years
I am sure that our friends who come through the doors today will be grateful for the few crumbs being thrown in their direction this morning. When you have next to nothing, with inflation raging at over 10%, what a relief it will be that energy bills won’t be going up beyond the mere £2500 they will have to stump up until June. And it will be welcome news that food bank users, as well as the rest of us, will benefit when the cap on the amount people can accumulate in pension savings before having to pay tax (currently £1.07mn) will be abolished completely. Some crumbs.
Of course, I don’t mean any of this. This was a budget for the richest 1%, not the non super rich, riff raff and lower orders, who are among the small minority – 99% – for whom it was a waste of time. Rupert Murdoch’s drooping organ, The Sun, praises Hunt for not increasing fuel duty which is dead handy for those who can’t afford to drive in the first place but imagine praising Hunt for something he didn’t do? I’ve no objection to the increase in tobacco duty but his crafty stealth tax increases on wine and beer, except in pubs where poorer people can’t afford to visit anyway, is yet another stake in the heart of the alcohol industry.
The reality of 13 years of miserable Conservative rule is that the likes of Hunt just don’t care. In their eyes, the sick and disabled are all scroungers, the unemployed are all work shy and those who cannot afford to eat brought it upon themselves by choosing to be poor. And the best way to deal with the apparently deserving poor is to make them even poorer. It’s the only language they understand. Or something.
I would love to have seen at least a very least a small gesture at alleviating food poverty and poverty in general, but there was nothing. Just the usual patronising ‘work is a virtue’ pish from an elite privately educated, Oxford educated multimillionaire who, I suggest, has never done an honest day’s toil in all his life. A management consultant, a PR executive? Not exactly back-breaking factory work, is it? That, I put it to you m’lud, suggests Hunt does not have the first idea of how ordinary folk live their lives and furthermore has no interest in learning.
Yesterday’s budget was all about ‘steady as she goes’, a contrast to the disastrous Liz Truss/Kwasi Kwarteng budget of last autumn which saw the Bank of England having to bail out pension funds and raising interest rates, pushing up the cost of borrowing for millions of working class people. The big stuff will happen with the usual tax giveaway budget just before the next general election, which will doubtless be the usual smoke and mirrors deception. One thing is for sure: the poorest people in the land won’t benefit. Under this government they never have and never will.
I won’t really be talking about the budget to our friends who come to see us today. For many of them, it will represent a different world in which they don’t live, a distant planet, perhaps. We can only conclude that Hunt and the government to which he belongs really don’t care about anyone except the rich and privileged. That’s because it’s true.
