These signs suggest a series of policy announcements designed to make voters feel better about themselves before polling day in late 2024
Source - Daily Telegraph - 16/03/23
The words "general election" were not included in Jeremy Hunt's Budget 7,700-word speech on Wednesday.
Yet they might as well have been, given the way that so many of the measures seem to come to fruition later next year, when the UK is almost certainly heading for the polls.
An election was certainly on the mind of Mr Hunt when the Chancellor turned up at Wednesday night's 1922 Committee meeting to brief his Budget measures to backbench Tories.
"I shall be talking about the way this is going to help them with an election," Mr Hunt told reporters as he entered the committee room to speak to them.
All the signs in the Budget are pointing towards a series of policy announcements designed to make voters feel better about themselves before polling day in late 2024.
Take the billions of pounds spent on extending 30-hours free childcare. The policy is introduced in two waves. From April next year working parents of two-year-olds will be able to access 15 hours' free childcare a week, affecting 285,000 children.
Then in September of next year, the scheme is extended to children aged just nine months. The number of children who will benefit more than doubles to 640,000.
That's a lot of parents who might be feeling more like voting Conservative when they find childcare more affordable, if the election is held in October or November 2024.
It is not just parents of toddlers who are benefitting from the Budget. The cap on the lifetime pensions saving allowance is abolished completely in April next year.
It might only be a small number of very wealthy older workers who can afford to save more than £1million into a pension pot - but every vote counts, in what might be a very close election a few months later.
'Tories can cut taxes, when they want to'
Elsewhere the biggest chunk of the £11billion set aside for spending on defence and national security - £3billion - will be spent in the 2024/25 tax year, just in time to remind voters of the Tories' commitment to defence.
And helpfully, the wider economic picture is improving too, with inflation now forecast to have fallen from 10.7 per cent at the end of last year to just 2.9 per cent by the end of this year.
And this time next year a recovery of sorts will be in full swing with the economy forecast to grow by 1.8 per cent, after avoiding a technical recession by contracting just 0.2 per cent this year.
That should ensure that Mr Hunt will have enough fiscal headroom for tax cuts. And one obvious one leaps out.
Remember how the Government had planned to cut the base rate of income tax from 20p to 19p in April 2024?
It was abandoned when Mr Hunt replaced Kwasi Kwarteng as Chancellor in October last year in a bid to reassure the markets about the UK's tax-and-spend policies.
The improving economic picture means it could be reinstated in next March's Budget, not least because it was first announced when Mr Sunak was chancellor, just 12 short months ago.
A cut in the base rate next March would come just in time for a general election when they will want to remind voters that the Tories can cut taxes, when they want to.
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