A budget that both “needs improvement” & “exceeds expectations”

The budget headline is a £127bn deficit and current account stabilisation where the Tories had planned further reductions in expenditure.

While not being willing to give Paul Mason the last word, he says, in a Medium article,

“You can quibble with details of Reeves’ plan, but it is a solid social-democratic reaction to the situation she found herself in. It looked after the workers, it taxed the bosses and the rich, it stabilised debt and left room for tens of billions of investment in the NHS, schools and homes; and it hiked the minimum wage.”

I don’t think it’s quite there, but I am on the side of those who say, it’s not too bad and could have been worse. It, in the words of most performance management systems, “Exceeds expectations”, although most of those were set by themselves. There remain some unsolved problems and some risk but I think this response from Jeremy Corbyn and the Green Party misses the mark, it is not austerity light.

The question remains is it enough to create the conditions to grow the economy, repair our public services and reversed the decades of underinvestment and low productivity. Simon Wren Lewis, in an article entitled, A budget that points way but doesn’t get us very far is not so sure, and James Meadway, in an article entitled “…