Labour’s desperate Budget briefing has all the hallmarks of a fiasco

Keir Starmer’s ministers must stop their amateurish, will-they-won’t-they pantomime act

Keir Starmer once said that he wanted his government to be compared with Labour’s radical post-war administration led by Clement Attlee.
He probably did not mean that he wanted to serve only one full term followed by 13 years in opposition. But with his chancellor’s first Budget being presented this week, he risks exactly that fate unless he can persuade his ministers to return to the ancient and admittedly unfashionable conventions pursued by Attlee’s administration.
In 1947 the chancellor, Hugh Dalton, resigned after leaking key details of his Budget to a friendly journalist who splashed it across the front page of his newspaper 20 minutes before Dalton rose to deliver his speech. Can you imagine any chancellor, of either party, following the same honourable course these days?
And yet the necessity for such message discipline has never been more urgent. So cavalier have ministers and special advisers been with information about the Budget that voters – dare I say “ordinary working people” – have been panicked into making potentially rash decisions about their finances in the weeks and days leading up to Wednesday’s speech by Rachel Reeves.
It’s not just speculation. Journalists working from heavy hints and explicit information have reported plans by Reeves to increase Capital Gains Tax, which has led to private landlords putting properties on the market in order to shield their investments from the taxman. Company directors have wound up their enterprises, with voluntary liquidations of businesses rising above 1600 in October, according to the UK’s official public record The Gazette, more than double the number recorded over the same period last year.
Similarly, according to investment platform Bestinvest, the number of savers who have maxed out their annual ISA limit to £20,000 increased by over 300 per cent in the first half of this month.
There have even been reports of people dipping into their pension pots, based on rumours of imminent changes to investment rules.
It would be tempting to tell everyone to calm down and wait for the details of the Budget. We only have two days to wait, after all.
But it is perfectly natural that we might want to take whatever action might appear necessary to protect our assets – whether that means shares, companies, pensions or property – from a Treasury desperate to fill various fiscal black holes of indeterminate number and uncertain size. And it is that uncertainty, that fear for our future personal wealth, that established the convention of secrecy around Budgets in the first place.
To divulge even a hint of what might be inside the chancellor’s famous red box before he stood up in the Commons to read it out was considered not only bad form, but dangerously irresponsible to the nation. Attlee subsequently described his ex-chancellor as a “stupid ass” and couldn’t understand why Dalton felt it necessary even to answer journalists’ questions, either on Budget day or at any other time. 
What would the great reformer think of his political descendants briefing endlessly to the media about what may or may not be being planned, with no regard whatsoever to the impact such actions might have on the livelihood, not to mention the mental health, of savers, investors and business leaders?
This Budget is not the first to have been widely briefed. In 2013 George Osborne’s Budget was leaked almost in its entirety to the London Evening Standard, and the very notion that the chancellor himself would resign as a result was not taken remotely seriously. Seventy years ago, the measures contained in a Budget speech were closely guarded for the sake of the nation, even if it might have proved advantageous to the government to leak selective parts in advance.
Such old-fashioned niceties have long since been dispensed with. That has allowed ever greater and more egregious behaviour in advance of Budgets, culminating in the pantomime of the last few weeks, to the point where we are now awaiting the formal Budget announcement merely to check off on our score cards the measures we have all been told to expect.
While journalists and editors have benefited from an inexhaustible supply of headlines, the information and misinformation that has been spread by enthusiastic ministers and their aides has not served the country or its citizens well.
The run-up to a Budget will always involve speculation and debate about what the chancellor is planning. But such discussions should never be informed by “Treasury sources” talking up one change or another – not because of convention or tradition, but because such behaviour has a real impact on people’s finances, even before the chancellor stands up at the despatch box. It is amateurish and it is self-indulgent.
And if Keir Starmer really wants us to compare his administration with Attlee’s, he might start by ordering his ministers to behave like their historic predecessors.