Labour budget: is it austerity by the back door?

LABOUR’S BUDGET, delivered by Chancellor Rachel Reeves but clearly endorsed by Keir Starmer, has divided economists and journalists alike. It’s also divided the three Tower Hamlets MPs.

●Poplar & Limehouse MP Apsana Begum took a balanced view – welcoming some announcements, but overall dismayed that the Government hasn’t gone far enough. She tweeted (Xd?) that it had “delivered a long overdue increase in the Living Wage, and welcome measures to tackle tax avoidance.” “But,” she continued, “after fourteen years of the Tories, unfortunately it is clear: austerity is still far from over.”

Apsana returned to a former campaign she had been part of: removing the two child benefits cap. She tweeted that the Budget had been “an opportunity to scrap the Tories’two-child benefits cap.” She went on to warn that “The cost of the failure to tackle child poverty will be paid by vulnerabe children.”

●Rushanara Ali, MP for Bethnal Green & Stepney, was much more positive, re-tweeting a humungous list of statements telling us about large allocation of cash. It sounded great – and superficial at the sametime. For example, Labour will pay £30 million to set up breakfast clubs in UK schools. But the UK has around 600 constituencies, so that is only £50,000 per constituency. If each constituency has 50 schools, that’s £1,000 per school. If each school run five breakfast clubs a week for 40 weeks of the year, that is 200 breakfast clubs: so the funding allocation to each club is £5 per breakfast club session. Those figures are very rough, but so is the settlement.

Incidentally, on her X accounts, Rushanara is now describing herself as “Minister for Homelessness and Democracy”. We can only hope that is a quaint House of Commons way of speaking, and she is actually the Minister against homelessness, not for it.

●The third MP to represent Tower Hamlets constituents is Uma Kumaran, MP for Stratford and Bow. Unfortunately, our office could not manage to load any of Uma’s social media, so we are in the dark about her views on the budget. We’ll keep trying and we’ll include her in future reports if we can break through our technical issues.

All we were able to view during our research was Uma’s House of Commons Register of interests. From this we learn – as we are desperate to be seen to be fair any give you something about Tower Hamlets’ newest MP – is that a donation worth £7,000 was make to Uma’s constituency party to cover some of her election expenses by Sen Kandiah, who seems to be the Managing Director of Healthshare Diagnostics and is aso Chair of Tamils for Labour (says the Labour Party). We trust that Uma was pleased to see the budget give more funding to the NHS. From the same Register of Members’ Interests we also learn that Uma’s husband, Jacob Tilley, works for the political lobbying firm Cavendish Consulting. One of his jobs there was writing a preview of Labour’s manifesto, just before it was published – concentrating on what Labour’s policy on work and skills might be. We trust that Uma was pleased to see the wide range of funding policies that Rachel Reeves announced that are designed to tax employers in order to give more money to workers in the short term and prompt some consumer-led economic growth.

●Read more about it:
Tower Hamlets Mayor passes budget – Labour leadership in disarray
All’s well – till Labour loses the plot