The elephant in the room
Jeremy Hunt tiptoed around it, avoided it, didn’t mention it and had no explanation for it but the biggest and most important thing announced yesterday was the downgrading of growth by the OBR.
Earlier this year it was predicting growth next year of 1.8% and of 2.5% in 2025. Now it thinks the UK economy can manage just 0.7% next year and 1.4% in the year after.
That is a halving of an already terrible growth rate. Meanwhile the OBR has lowered the medium term potential growth rate of the economy from 1.8% a year to 1.6%. So much for all those reforms that the Chancellor announced boosting growth and the potential of the British economy.
Meanwhile this still remains the largest tax rising government since the war, and the pathetic giveaways yesterday are based on managing to keep departmental spending down, some time in the future.
In short the money he has found is illusory, he will have to find more to fund departments hit by massive levels of inflation, or to put it another way he wants Labour to find the cuts and austerity to pay for his pre-election giveaways.
Economics, trade and Brexit, not necessarily in that order but the dog always comes first.
By Jonty Bloom Media