In the week before the Budget, I usually amuse myself by pretending to be the Chancellor - which, unlike impersonating an admiral at a Remembrance parade, is not a criminal offence. Anyone can do it.
Just study the mess the economy is in and jot down predictions for what might be needed in the following week’s Budget to fix it. I would sit up in the Commons Press Gallery on the big day, ticking off what I got right. My average was around 60-70 per cent.
But Rachel Reeves has made this entertaining pastime impossible with so many leaks and U-turns that I am as confused about this upcoming Budget as she appears to be.This is no way to prepare for one. Nor the way it used to be.
In the past, the Chancellor and finance ministers and anyone involved in Treasury calculations would go into Budget purdah for several weeks beforehand. That meant keeping their lips zipped like Trappist monks.
It ensured nothing got out until the Budget Box was opened with a flourish on the day itself, and we would all hear the good (or bad) news for the first time and at the same time.
That is how Commons Speaker Lindsay Hoyle would like it still to be. He is a fierce advocate of government delivering announcements to Parliament first and gets grumpy when it doesn’t happen.
I've added up Rachel Reeves taxes and discovered an extremely serious accounting error - Nigel Nelson
|Getty Images
Yet for weeks now, we have been treated daily to one new tax rise after another. Most recently, a Milkshake Tax was introduced to end the sugar levy exemption on milky drinks.
Coca-Cola and Pepsi are not going to get off lightly either if the tax threshold of 5g of sugar in 100mls of pop goes down to four.
The plan is to raise £100million.It follows on the heels of a drip feed of other taxes Ms Reeves has been eyeing up - a hike in fuel duty, for example, worth £5.5billion, air passenger duty adding another £470million, insurance premium tax £800million, a further freeze in income tax thresholds for a cool £8billion.
It doesn’t stop there. Charging national insurance on salary sacrifice schemes to boost pension savings would give her £2billion.That means an employee would no longer get the extra £80 on every £1,000 saved, nor would the boss benefit by £150. (That’s NI of eight per cent for workers and 15 per cent for employers).
A mansion tax on homes worth £2million plus would raise £1.5billion, a hike in landfill tax another £1billion, gambling taxes £3.2billion, landlord national insurance £2.3billion, tax on cash ISAs £2.5billion and more changes to inheritance tax £2billion.
Taxing booze more heavily could add another £1.5billion, smokers may be asked to cough up an extra £800million, and a pay-per-mile EV tax would raise £1.8billion. Capital Gains Tax changes could rake in £1.5billion.
If you’ve been totting this up as we went along, you’ll notice that it adds up to more than Ms Reeves needs to fill her financial black hole. So some - or many - of these hikes so confidently predicted must be wrong.
On top of this, we had the unseemly spectacle of the Chancellor rolling the pitch for a manifesto-breaking income tax rise of 2p, which was later abandoned.
Allies put this down to finding an extra £10billion down the back of the sofa - critics to the realisation Labour backbenchers wouldn’t wear it.
But all this uncertainty spooked the markets and stopped people from spending. That puts a drag on economic growth, which Labour still trumpets as the long-term answer to our ills.We need to rethink the Budget process.
Either a return to the old purdah or genuine transparency, laying out the measures the Treasury wants to introduce and putting them out for public consultation to inform their final decisions.This clumsy halfway house will no longer do.
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