Wasn’t this precisely the kind of Budget many voters expected when they elected a Labour government, one that would finally offer a clear sense of Labour’s priorities and lift hundreds of thousands of families out of poverty?
The front pages could almost have written themselves on Thursday morning.
“Spiteful raids on strivers – to lavish billions on benefits St,” thundered the Daily Mail, beside a photograph of Rachel Reeves giving what it claimed was a “smirk” that apparently conveyed: “If you work hard and save prudently, I’m coming for you…”
Similarly, the Sun screamed: “The benefits Street Budget,” insisting that “families will foot handouts bill for skivers.”
Yet wasn’t this precisely the kind of Budget many voters expected when they elected a Labour government, one that would finally offer a clear sense of Labour’s priorities and lift hundreds of thousands of families out of poverty?
A Budget that returns redistribution and social protection to the centre of economic policy?
The outrage becomes even harder to take seriously when we remember these are the same newspapers that, barely three years ago, cheered on a Budget so catastrophic it helped detonate a cost-of-living crisis from which families are still recovering.
The market turmoil unleashed by ‘Trussonomics’ sent inflation soaring, crashed the pound, and triggered painful rises in mortgage rates and household bills, all borne by the “ordinary workers” the right-wing press claims to champion.
Back then, the praise bordered on the hysterical.
“This was the best budget I have ever heard a chancellor deliver, by a massive margin,” wrote Allister Heath on the front page of the Daily Telegraph. “The tax cuts were so huge and bold, the language so extraordinary, that at times I had to pinch myself to make sure I wasn’t dreaming.”
“At last, a true Tory budget,” crowed the Mail, while its columnist Alex Brummer applauded the “seismic” boldness of Kwasi Kwarteng’s plans.
Of course, the tune changed rapidly once the fallout hit. Within weeks, the same papers were savaging Truss for her humiliating U-turns and the “pig’s ear” of her economic strategy. The Sun even compared her to a dead parrot.
Some commentators, though, clung to the wreckage. Heath maintained that Truss and Kwarteng were simply “unlucky,” insisting they hadn’t crashed the economy because “it was about to come tumbling down anyway.”
This week, Heath was back again, this time proclaiming that “Labour’s victory is total. Socialism is back.” In Reeves’s “brave new world”, he claimed, “meritocracy is out – redistribution, welfarism and enforced equality are in.”
If the past few years have shown anything, it’s that much of the press and many of their favoured commentators don’t offer credible economic analysis. Instead, we get ideological mood swings dressed up as expertise. When a Budget fits their worldview, it’s hailed as visionary. When it doesn’t, it’s condemned as a disaster.
So, can we rely on these supposedly credible voices for clarity, consistency, or even basic economic sense?
On the evidence, absolutely not.
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