Budget furore

The budget is one of the high points of the political calendar, determining and laying out to the electorate how the government plans to spend its (our) money over the coming year and beyond. It gives succour to the media for weeks in advance, telling its readers and listeners what may or may not be coming up and giving advice, gratefully or not received by the Chancellor as to what they would do were they in her place. 

Thank goodness they are not as their job is to sell newspapers or get clicks, while hers is to try and make some semblance of public finances.

Then comes the great day, when the Chancellor stands on the steps of number 11 Downing Street, red despatch box in hand which fires the starting gun for the day’s festivities. After an hour or so on her feet, laying out her plans to Parliament, we are all aware of what is ahead of us and have now realised that the media knew no better than we did as to what was up her sleeve, (OBR mistakes aside).

Not to be outflanked, however, the media now turns its attention not to apologising for leading us up the garden path, nor scaring the life out of us by what might have been but rather laying out what the budget will mean to us as individuals. Each paper carries a range of example people, singletons, dinkies, mature couples and oldies on a state or private pension. You eagerly read it and try to mould yourself into one of the personas to see what you have won and lost. Perhaps it’s a penny or two gained on the roundabouts only to be offset by similar losses on the swings.

Yet this is not the point. The budget is to set the nation’s expenditure and do what the government thinks is right to set the country on the path it wants to see. It is not about the individual but about the collective. The money to run the country needs to come from somewhere and each of us is expected to carry some of the burden.

You may not like her and the government’s choices. No doubt you or I would have made different choices but we are not party to the information at her disposal. We don’t need to set the balance between the security of the country, the welfare of its citizens and the vagaries of the financial markets. That’s her job and at least we have the opportunity to vote for or against her in a few year’s time.

I know that this won’t sell papers or increase clicks but we need to focus on how the budget affects the trajectory of the country rather than our own immediate circumstances. It’s a job I wouldn’t want.