- A tight budget - 28th October 2026
- Mocking bird - 28th October 2026
- Turning Japanese - 28th October 2026
During 23 years at the BBC, and 43 years in journalism, our Editor, Welshman Phil Parry, presented any number of ‘budget specials’, where he would always look for the spectacular missteps (such as the notorious ‘pasty tax’), but the most that can be said about this one is the Conservative accusation, that John Healey’s measures are “not good enough”. He might settle for that!
It was always a case of working out what was the ‘top line’.
Sometimes it became obvious, such as George Osborne’s ‘pasty tax’ (and John Healey wasn’t so stupid as to repeat THAT!), with Mr Osborne facing particular ridicule by declaring later that people could avoid the tax, by eating the pasty cold.
This was a proposal in the 2012 budget to simplify the tax treatment of “hot takeaway food” so that Value-Added Tax (VAT) would be charged at 20 per cent in all cases.
But the foolhardiness of this wasn’t immediately obvious because it was buried in the small print, and I have to be honest, I probably wouldn’t have spotted it at the time – it was only later that it became clear this was a huge misstep.
The Chancellor John Healey APPEARS to have avoided these pitfalls (although we won’t know for sure for several days), and the most that can be said about it, is that it’s actually rather boring, because it hasn’t tackled the big challenge – the amount of debt the UK has, and it could be argued that the whole system is broken, so he should have looked at that.
The famous ‘top line’ seems to be that people living in homes in council tax bands A to D are to get a £100 energy payment this winter, which, we are told, will help 20 million households, and that there is to be a rise in bank tax.
So the worst charge of Tory leader Kemi Badenoch is that Mr Healey’s budget is “not good enough”, and that the UK is “drowning in an out of control welfare system”.
Perhaps Mr Healey will settle for comments like that.
Admittedly the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) has declared in its report that the tax burden is forecast to “increase sharply” to a record high, but this is not like the ‘pasty tax’, nor does it address the big issue that the UK may be heading for a cliff edge in the years to come.
Before it was delivered The Economist was scathing, saying that: “Healey’s budget is shaping up to be a classic of the genre, fiddling with small tax rises when in fact the whole system is flawed. Difficult decisions seem set to be postponed until a spending review next year
“The backdrop is bleak. Britain’s ten-year borrowing cost has risen to 5.4%, from 4.4% at the latest forecast by the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) in March. That is partly because the Iran war has raised energy prices, but many other factors—from outsize government borrowing to surging global demand for capital—mean bond yields are unlikely to fall soon. The Resolution Foundation, a think-tank, reckons the government will need to spend £14bn ($19bn, or 0.4% of GDP) more on debt interest in the fiscal year to 2030 than previously assumed”.
The mockery of Mr Healey began even before he stood up in the House of Commons (HoC). The Economist had also compared him to football managers, and, quoting others, used the term “bald fraud”.
It said: ‘Even a bald fraud can prosper for a while. Some budgets mark sea changes; the one on October 28th will not, unless something goes badly wrong. Some money for defence will be found and lip service will be paid to growth. Should it go without a hitch, plaudits will come in anyway: “steady”, “solid”, “he looked the part”‘.
Maybe we can add ‘not good enough’ to this list…
The memories of Phil’s astonishing decades long award-winning career in journalism (when politicians often ducked difficult problems), as he was gripped by the rare disabling condition Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia (HSP), have been released in a major book ‘A GOOD STORY’. Order the book now!
