The era of rabbits is over… long live the era of slugs

Our Playmobil/robot Chancellor pulls something soft and slow out of her go-go Budget hat

Having spent the last two weeks leaking every detail of the Budget to all and sundry, many of us gathered in the House of Commons were wondering what on earth the animated Playmobil figure in charge of our economy was actually going to announce.
Oh, that’s right, of course, party point-scoring. The Chancellor spent the first ten minutes or so blaming the Tories, which has become something of a main focus of all Labour policy announcements of late.
At least, in these straitened times, some people get to live rent-free somewhere. Just a shame it’s inside the heads of Sir Oinky, Big Ange and the Playmobil Pinocchio.
After the slanging match, it was back to another well-worn progressive peccadillo.
“I am deeply proud to be Britain’s first female Chancellor of the Exchequer,” said Reeves in the weird staccato tone that makes it sound like she’s Britain’s first robot Chancellor as well.
“To girls everywhere, I say let there be no ceiling on your ambition.” That’s right, girlies, put down that Barbie: you too can inflict the largest tax rises on ordinary people for 50 years! Girl power!
“I uncovered the £22bn black hole”, she crowed, triggering jeers from the Tories and counter-jeers from her colleagues. Despite Reeves’s assurances, however, the OBR later failed to substantiate the figure. Awks. I suspect they’ll be getting a Playmobil sandbagging on Thursday morning.
Eventually, we got to the economy. Reeves announced glacial economic growth, averaging about 1.5 per cent over the next six years, as though she’d discovered perpetual motion.
The Treasury had spent the morning briefing journalists that “the era of rabbits is over”. Clearly, the era of slugs had now begun.
Presumably on the instruction of her handlers, Reeves had put on her best, market-calming, artificial happy voice to deliver the bad news. Prozac mixed with vinegar. “My belief in Britain burns brighter than ever,” she said, unconvincingly.
There was talk of “fixing the foundations” and the “seven pillars of our growth strategy”; imagine TE Lawrence crossed with Rachel from Accounts.
This was unsurprisingly a Budget heavy on class warfare and attacks on panto “baddies”. She confirmed the spiteful raid on private schools, to kick in midway through the school year.
Family farms took a beating too; Steve Reed’s next meet-and-greet in his freebie wellies should be interesting. A tax on private jets, which Reeves heavily implied had purely been included as a dig at Rishi Sunak.
The Chancellor leered expectantly across the despatch box when announcing this part, but Sunak and Jeremy Hunt, busily number-crunching, didn’t bother looking up. “We are ASKING businesses to pay more,” she said, as if they were having a whip-round at a village fete.
Things didn’t get much more reassuring; promises to clobber oil and gas companies to fund a quango controlled by Ed Miliband. She proudly unveiled a Pythonesque public body, the Office of Value for Money, to be headed by a chap whose most recent job was… on the board of HS2. God help us all.
Finally we came to Sunak’s response. He had arranged this to be his swansong, his final event as Leader of the Opposition. It was certainly swan-like in one sense – the former prime minister looked angry enough to break a man’s arm. There was genuine fury as he spat out his lines, real venom in each accusation of deceit. “They’ve fiddled the figures”, he cried.
Reeves squirmed as her previous promises were read out to her. It’s a shame that it took his final performance for him to get quite so fierce. Perhaps he will go down as one of the great “lost leaders” of Tory history.
On such a momentous day, there still was no danger of parliamentary behaviour from Labour. They yelled throughout the Leader of the Opposition’s speech: I stopped counting on the 30th scream of “shame!” from the red-rosetted macaques on the Government benches.
You can always tell which backbenchers are most gagging for a job by the amount of aggressive nodding and heckling that goes on – and today the desperation from the unpromoted was particularly strong. Shaun Davies, the Telford MP, howled into the middle distance like a coyote with ADHD.
Sunak pointed out that the Chancellor of the Exchequer lacked business experience, and was loudly heckled by Wes Streeting.
Why would a man whose prior training for the job of Health Secretary consisted of running the National Union of Students, a Petri dish of blue-haired basket cases, possibly want to jeer the idea that relevant experience for a Cabinet position might be beneficial? We’ll never know.
Meanwhile gloomy forecasts swirled around – lower growth, higher mortgage rates, higher debt and inflation than predicted under the last government.
It’s now abundantly clear that when Labour said “working people”, they didn’t mean anyone with a job, anyone who employs people, farmers, small business owners, anyone with savings or a modest pension, anyone who smokes, vapes, travels by bus, is right-handed or has a pulse.
But hey, at least it was a girl doing it.