Simon Clarke: This is a broken backed Chancellor about to deliver a second-choice Budget | Conservative Home

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

54% : Indeed, the Government came out of a welfare savings drive in the ludicrous position of slightly increasing what it was already planning to spend.
52% : This month opened with Rachel Reeves giving an extraordinary emergency statement to pave the way to break Labour's manifesto promise not to raise national insurance, VAT or income tax on "working people".
52% : Income tax rates would not rise after all, because the forecasts, so we were told, had improved.
51% : But the real crunch came this June, when the Government caved in to its own MPs over welfare spending.
51% : Even if their plans had been implemented, the welfare bill was still set to rise from £66.3 billion in 2023/24 to £97.7 billion in 2029/30.
47% : Why is it so vital to add to what is already the highest tax burden Britain has borne since the Second World War?
45% : UK borrowing costs rose, because while the markets may not love an income tax rate rise, the extra income it would deliver is almost certain - that's the main advantage of raising one of the big, broad-based taxes.
45% : Lest we forget, what Keir Starmer and Liz Kendall wanted to do was not to reduce welfare spending in real terms, but simply to slow the staggering rate of its post-pandemic increase - the absolute minimum that common sense requires.
44% : It's because public spending is out of control.
42% : Not only is the tax revenue set to be generated by these less inherently secure and predictable, bond traders also know that each individual tax measure may fall victim to Labour MPs' unwillingness to vote for it at Finance Bill stage as and when they come under pressure.
40% : The country is being governed by a Labour Party that can't deliver any reductions in spending, and also can't reliably deliver the tax rises needed in the alternative.

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.