Coronavirus was deployed by the Conjurer of the Exchequer the way a magician uses distraction, a form of deception, to hide what’s really happening.
Official forecasts found economic feeble growth slowing further before the disease erupted and Tory banker Rishi Sunak’s pantomime act in Parliament.
Equally Brexit isn’t done when trade barriers with our European neighbours would require 50,000 form fillers and destroy productive jobs.
Yet there is no doubt this Budget is a shift in gears by the Conservatives.
Costing his emergency spending at £30-billion, the Treasury cheque writer’s loosened his party’s 10-year self-defeating austerity obsession when borrowing must go up.
An apology that didn’t work was noticeably missing, leech doctor bloodsucking deflating wages and growth while inflating national debt over the lost decade.
Had the Tories applied a coronavirus-style financial blood transfusion after the banking collapse instead of raising VAT by a record £12-billion and scything investment, we’d all be better off.
The devil will be in the Treasury red book’s detail when the document’s dissected by independent number crunches.
Labour’s dilemma is what does the current leadership welcome and what does it damn.
Extra spending won’t repair all the damage inflicted to public services and wage packets over the past 10 years.
Jeremy Corbyn was surely right to assert that Sunak’s acknowledged austerity didn’t work.
But an opposition demanding higher spending is risking a backlash in criticising higher spending.
Too little, too late might be fair judgement, particularly on the NHS. Selling that critique, however, is trickier.
The political battleground’s shifted and the Conjurer of the Exchequer’s tricks are a Tory Government trying to cement blue bricks in Labour’s red wall.
