Rishi Sunak’s budget marks a turn to big-state Conservatism
British tax rates will rise to levels last seen in the 1950s
WHO IS RISHI SUNAK? Listen to the chancellor’s recent rhetoric, and you could be forgiven for thinking he was cast in the mould of a predecessor, George Osborne, who slashed the state in response to the global financial crisis. In a speech to the Conservative Party faithful on October 4th Mr Sunak described borrowing as “immoral”, and emphasised his eagerness to restore order to the public finances. But the budget he delivered on October 27th confused the picture. Reeling off spending measures, he refused to apologise for raising taxes and lauded the spending they supported. “The Conservatives are the real party of public services,” he trilled.
This article appeared in the Britain section of the print edition under the headline “Farewell to austerity”
Britain October 30th 2021
- Rishi Sunak’s budget marks a turn to big-state Conservatism
- Ministers roll out the red carpet for entrepreneurs and their investors
- What’s behind the Great British Battery Bonanza?
- Britain’s minimum wage is catching up with pre-pandemic ambitions
- A bronze chicken looted in 1897 is flying back to Nigeria
- An attempt to stop Britain sharing expats’ data with Uncle Sam
- The greening of Boris Johnson
From the October 30th 2021 edition
Discover stories from this section and more in the list of contents
Explore the editionDiscover more
The slow death of a Labour buzzword
And what that says about Britain’s place in the world
Britain’s Supreme Court considers what a woman is
At last. Britons had been wondering what those 34m people who are not men might be
Can potholes fuel populism?
A new paper looks at one explanation for the rise of Reform UK
Are British voters as clueless as Labour’s intelligentsia thinks?
How the idea of false consciousness conquered the governing party