After what’s been an almighty binge of sweeties and Punch and Judy politics, this coming Wednesday is going to feel like the mother of all mornings after the night before. That’ll be when Chancellor Rachel Reeves unveils her long list of losers over the next few years in the Spending Review. And, as our Political Correspondent Peter Spencer reports, they’re not going to like it.
What’s been happening in Donald Trump’s big tent and Nigel Farage’s somewhat smaller version calls to mind one of Oscar Wilde’s many brilliant quips: ‘Nothing succeeds like excess.’
Their antics are up there with the most extreme, no-holds-barred martial arts. But morbidly fascinating though they may be, they’re largely a spectator sport. Not saying they don’t come with a message, mind.
Which is where Ms Reeves’ big not-very-big spender announcement comes in. The British electorate’s been softened up for days, with free school dinners for more kids, more cash for public transport outside London, more money for the health service and a boost to the armed services.
But the flipside of that coin will come in her so-called Spending Review, in the form of real-terms cuts in almost every other already pretty threadbare public service. As one senior Labour figure in the know put it: ‘It’s going to be ugly.’
The extent of the stresses and strains is writ large in the pleas, or, rather, threats, that’ve been pouring in from what would normally be strictly non-partisan sources. Top cops up to and including the boss of the Metropolitan Police, for example, have been warning that cash constraints would mean ‘stark choices’. About which crimes they do – and don’t – investigate.
And the former head of the British Army suggested the government’s planned increase to defence spending still amounts to asking Hitler not to invade until 1946 because we wouldn’t be ready. With Trump breathing down our necks to splash out more and Vladimir Putin’s barbarism reinforcing that case, the Prime Minister has made much of his readiness to bolster our forces.
But the bind he’s in is starkly underlined by a YouGov poll which showed that nearly half of us think he’s right to do so, but hardly anyone thinks he should raise taxes to pay for it. And that in its turn highlights the central dilemma that Starmer and Ms Reeves have to grapple with all the way through to the autumn budget.
While nearly all economists are convinced that cometh that hour cometh their hands rummaging in working people’s pockets, they’re still stuck with their pre-election pledge not to do any such thing.
Hence the refusal to date to pull the obvious revenue-raising levers of increasing income tax, VAT or National Insurance on employees. But hence also their ways of getting round the problem by, for example, their spectacularly hated and now pulled back from abolition of the winter fuel allowance for nearly all oldies.
If they’d just bitten the bullet and used the black hole they maintained the Tories had left in the public purse as justification for breaking their promise they’d have given themselves much more leeway.
Indeed, some in the party say not doing so was Reeves’ defining error. ‘That’s the original sin as far as I’m concerned,’ said one. And, given Labour’s extraordinarily rapid fall from public grace it’s little wonder so many members are questioning how it’s going about things. As one-time leader Harold Wilson once put it:
‘The Labour Party is like a stage-coach. If you rattle along at great speed everybody is too exhilarated or seasick to cause any trouble. But if you stop everybody gets out and argues about where to go next.’
There are also plenty of arguments about how in god’s name it should sell its message. A telling little vignette cropped up last week when the Chancellor was touting her transport links uplift. Oop there in Rochdale, the one-time cabinet minister now Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham fired up the audience of workers with how brilliant the new joined-up travel network was for everyone.
By contrast, when Ms Reeves explained in her drearily jargon-laden way how she’d adjusted the fiscal rules to make her plan possible they all looked bored out of their skulls.
Memo to government. Make it sexy. Or find someone who can. Cue Nigel Farage. That cheeky-chappie pint-in-the-pub common touch is unquestionably winning him friends everywhere, to the point that polls suggest he really could, maybe, make it to Number Ten. Certainly helped get his party a more than respectable showing in last week’s Scottish parliament by-election.
Ok, Labour confounded many expectations by actually winning it. But, given that Farage was nobody north of the border until pretty recently, he’s got good reason to be chuffed. The more so as top people in his own tribe have been chewing chunks out of one another in hideously public bust-ups. Chairman Zia Yusuf, who’d been tasked with making the operation more professional, decided the party’s newest MP’s call for a ban on burkas was, more than unprofessional, just plain dumb.
So he quit. To the fulsomely expressed regret of almost everyone. So fulsome, in fact, that a couple of days later he un-quit. Doubtless to the great relief of the boss. Still, all a bit messy, albeit nothing next to the pistols-at-dawn breakup between the world’s most powerful man, and the world’s richest.
Though it’s been clear for some time that anything approaching good manners is out of fashion in the court of King Donald this episode’s taken incivility to a whole new level. As shouting matches go it makes the Battle of Hastings look like a game of Monopoly.
An analogy that’s more fitting than it might seem, as in Trump and Elon Musk’s winner-takes-all world, money’s the real king. And there may just be a smattering of logic in the tech billionaire’s frothing-at-the-mouth objection to what his ex-bestie calls his ‘big beautiful bill’. That’s because there are suggestions that this huge tax and spend prospectus just could trigger the implosion of the Yankee economy.
Comparisons are being drawn in some quarters with short-lived PM Liz Truss’s tax and spend wheeze that nearly did for the British economy as well as her. Not a good look, the lettuce look. And not something to necessarily get the Donald’s heart singing a happy song, given how flagrantly image-conscious he is.
Food for thought therefore in a new study conducted in the Netherlands, that’s been published in the journal Perception. It suggests that if you want to look good then don’t even bother with Botox, just smile.
Many would say the best Trump can manage is the sort of gloating grimace that might have crossed Al Capone’s face after the St Valentine’s Day Massacre. And mindful, maybe, of that, he’s gone one further.
Make-up, according to the same research, works even better. And in spite of the paucity of evidence that The Donald ever reads anything you have to wonder if he isn’t way way ahead of the game. After all, why stop at a dab of slap here and there, when you can paint your whole face orange?
Watch Peter’s report at peterspencer.org
Peter Spencer has 40 years experience as a Political Correspondent in Westminster, working with London Broadcasting and Sky News. For more of his fascinating musings on the turbulent political landscape, follow him on Facebook & Twitter.