DAN HODGES: Rishi Sunak is a fiscal magician - more Tommy Cooper than Houdini
As people have gone through the small print of the Office for Budget Responsibility's chilling analysis of the state of the UK's finances, a consensus has started to form that Rishi Sunak's economic strategy is failing.
It's true Covid and the Russian invasion of Ukraine were not crises Rishi could have foreseen. But Chancellors have always been at the mercy of external events – from oil shocks, to wars, to global banking collapses. And the reality is this Chancellor has now lost control of the British economy. He claims a key priority is to reduce borrowing. 'The central fiscal judgment I am making today is to meet our fiscal rules with a margin of safety,' he announced last week.
Another of his priorities is supposedly getting an iron grip on spending: 'We have already taken difficult decisions with public finances, and that is why we will continue to weigh carefully calls for additional public spending.' 'Those net tax rises, plus the more tax-rich composition of economic activity that has been factored into this forecast, raise the tax burden from the 33.0 per cent of GDP recorded in 2019-20 to 36.3 per cent of GDP in 2026-27 – its highest level since the late 1940s.'
So it's proved. There was something staggeringly tin-eared about the way Rishi chose to boast about his tax-cutting instincts at the very moment he was clobbering the British people with the biggest tax bombshell since Hugh Gaitskell was Chancellor.
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