Phil Hammond's Budget Won't Convince Anyone That Tories Care

This was supposed to be the budget where the Conservatives addressed years of public anger against austerity. With Labour controlling the political conversation, the Tories need to get on that "caring about people" bandwagon. And so, today we were treated to the disorientating spectacle of Phil Hammond, the Chancellor known as "spreadsheet Phil" for his prudence, nobly promising to take on great social ills that years of Conservative government have at best done nothing to address and at worst actively created.

The build up to this year’s budget was about whether it would be “bold” or “boring”. Can’t it be both? It was definitely boring, but there’s something weirdly bold in facing up to a country reeling from years of unnecessary austerity, looking it in the eyes and saying, “One of the things I love most about this county is its sense of opportunity.”

He talked of, “a future that will be full of change; full of new challenges and above all full of new opportunities,” but the prognosis can only be that the rhetoric masks piss-weak measures that will do little in the here and now. For a lost generation, he has a railcard. For the homeless, he has a taskforce. For the crisis of plastic choking our oceans, he has an investigation.

He can’t really dress lack of ambition up as economic competence either, given that the economic outlook is still amazingly bad. Growth predictions have been revised down, and Hammond claimed that the national debt will finally fall next year.

The big headline grabber in the Tory attempt to win back Millenials was the scrapping of stamp duty for first time buyers purchasing properties worth up to £300,000. Now I know we’ve all been cutting down on our avocado consumption and saving £6,000 a year by not going on nights out, but before you rush to lay down your deposit on a swag starter pad outside Bletchley, the Office of Budgetary Responsibility has said that this measure will push house prices up by 0.3 percent and benefit current property owners more than it would first time buyers.

One of the main problems has been the lack of house building, which Phil tackled head on by saying, “Put simply, successive governments over decades have failed to build enough homes to deliver the home-owning dream that this country has always been proud of.” He then immediately praised his own government’s house building record, saying, “that is a remarkable achievement.” But they’re not resting on their laurels, they promised 300,000 new homes a year. Or to be specific, to “create the financial incentives necessary to deliver 300,000 net additional homes a year on average by the mid-2020s.” So that’s another not-really-promise, and a set of “incentives” for developers to clean up on. The people already profiting from the housing crisis will profit again.

The government is in such a chaotic torpor that, while their practical measures come across as inadequate, their sweeping moral missions are hard to take seriously. Take rough sleeping, which Phil also railed against. He borrowed some messianic Corbynite rhetoric to say that, “it is unacceptable that in 21st Century Britain there are people sleeping on the streets.” He committed to “halving rough sleeping by 2022, and eliminating it by 2027.” Homelessness has doubled since 2010. Does anyone believe this crap?

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The air of unreality was perhaps best summed up by the investment in getting driverless cars on the road by 2021. I don’t know about you but I have never once had a conversation with anyone who was really excited for driverless cars. I get that this is a nod towards modernisation and looking like a thrusting, futuristic economy, but can you imagine anyone engaged with the many pressing societal issues facing this country actually getting hyped about not having to worry about their Uber rating? Hammond said there are “good reasons” to embrace this technology, but did not say what those reasons are.

While there were giveaways for the young (hyped for the Millenial railcard. Margate 2k18 anyone?), there was a bung for Tory hard-Brexiteers, in the form of an extra £3 billion for Brexit preparations. This is supposed to signal that the government is serious about Brexit, and therefore seems like a sensible investment in my future and yours.

For all the crocodile tears about the poor and the meek, Jeremy Corbyn managed to hang on to his mantle as defender of the vulnerable, flipping his lid at a Tory MP who interrupted with a joke as he spoke about cuts to care budgets for the elderly. The video of that is going viral, you’ve probably already seen it, and its’ already dispelled any projected nice guy image from the Tories.

@SimonChilds13