Less for More. Before UK 2025 Budget.

 It is November 2025 and one day to go before the much vaunted and speculated about budget. According to many it is not going to be a good one. I’d be very surprised if they were wrong.

Now I am old enough to have lived through many budgets and for the most part the difference to the pockets of the average person changes very little. One year the budget afforded me the increase of half a pint of beer a week. The super yacht was still a pipe dream. However, where we live in a cost of living crisis, the same old solutions to solve the problem of balancing the books are becoming noticeably ineffective.

I remember back in the 1980s when chocolate bars started to increase in size and then decrease in the 2010s when the UK spiralled down into austerity. Roll on a couple of decades and some inflation we ended up with chocolate bars smaller but costing as much as when they were bigger; a symptom known as ‘shrinkflation’. The reason was obviously things like manufacturing costs and the rising cost of ingredients along with trying to increase profits. Within this context the analogy starts to resonate with the 2025 budget issue.

You see, it doesn’t matter what the outcome of the budget is for the average working person. The simple fact, espoused currently by the charismatic figures of Gary Stevenson and Zak Polansky, is that we are trying to make a giant size chocolate bar out of half the ingredients.

Half the hypothetical chocolate bar ingredients are owned by the super rich who make more money while they sleep than most people can earn in a year. It wasn’t always this bad but when you notice you’re getting less but paying more and more over time, you start to wonder where all the money is going?

And no, it is not going to illegal immigrants. This is a typical ploy invented by some ideologues to distract you from their stash. I recall an animal programme where the predator defecates on their kill to hide it from others. The Reform party is doing this rather well, stirring up hatred and fear among the misinformed. In fact the cost of potential asylum seekers is minuscule compared to the tax avoidance among corporations and super rich individuals with clever accountants. The reason why so-called illegal immigration got out of control? Bad policy after Brexit and not enough money to do anything about it. 

The real crisis that we feel today goes back to decisions made by successive governments over decades from the end of WWII and upward; with perhaps the exception of the National Health Service (that the Reform Party would dismantle and set up an American style health insurance system). The real crisis comes down to short term politics and no appetite to commit to long term investments.

Let us look at today’s needs:
We need more housing. Labour let council houses run down in the 70s and Conservative subsequently sold them off to housing associations. From then on, no plan for more council houses were considered and no realistic plan for growing the country’s housing needs. So we have a shortage of housing, which pushes the value of houses up to buy or rent. The 2020 generation are very unlikely to own a house in their lifetime unless the system changes and more houses are built. There also has to be a greater number of ‘affordable houses’ that corresponds to wages.

We need higher wages. The minimum wage, much vaunted by the conservatives as the ‘living wage’ is not enough to even rent a flat. The gap between rich and poor has never been greater because wages have remained stagnant over the austerity years of 2010 and 2020. Junior doctors got a record wage rise in 2024 after a series of strikes and the Labour Party willing to address the real cut in wages. However, doctors are planning to strike again because they would still need another 20% rise to get them back to wage parity of 2010.

The minimum wage has hardly risen at all over this time and certainly not of the order demanded by doctors. As the cost of living goes up, the value of the minimum wage shrinks. Working people are going to food banks and the Government continues to pay tax credits to low income households.

We need more hospital and schools. The old buildings are crumbling and Governments appear to be happy to instead spend billions on a high speed rail link. Labour’s private finance initiative was developed as a way of saving money but without investment in upgrading those buildings, it will end up costing more. One wonders why, even then, the government did not address the elephant in the room and devise a longer term strategy for building our infrastructure.

We need more dentists and GPs. The British people are flocking to The Reform party over these simple needs. You can’t get a GP appointment. You can’t get an NHS dentist and most people certainly can’t afford a private dentist. And yet the immigration crisis, a product exacerbated by leaving the EU (and I voted to leave) has thrown the whole immigration system into turmoil. There was a shortage of GPs and Dentists due to government policy - not immigrants.

All of the above needs require investment but after the COVID pandemic drove the UK borrowing to 100% of GDP there was no more money to draw on… at least there was no more of the small chocolate bar left to spend on anything. And who are the first to pay the price for lack of ingredients  (even if they don’t possess them)? The disabled, the sick, mental health, welfare recipients, legal aid, pensioners (remember WASPI women?), in fact anyone who is deemed to be not a ‘contributing unit’ to the tax system; that is apart from the people who actually do have the other half of the ingredients.

The only solution is not to tax to death those who earn a wage by working for an employer, or the small and medium business that drives the economy but to tax those who have squirrelled away the money that has caused the shrinkflation.

Don’t tax the workers - tax the wealth.

The workers become the economy’s consumers, without whom there would be no economy. Those who rent or have mortgages need disposable income that does not include the necessity fo frequenting food banks. For the minimum wage to become a living wage, prices have to come down or wages have to go up, otherwise the minimum wage is just an arbitrary figure plucked out to the air.

You can almost guarantee that none of this will be addressed in the 2025 budget. The UK must look to different solutions and the old established parties have had decades to come up with the goods, which is why the Reform Party is storming ahead in the polls and The Green Party is starting to catch them up, overtaking the old parties. The choice politically is remarkably simple t the 2029 general election (or earlier); Vote to make the rich richer and impoverish the poor, privatise everything including the NHS and investing in the needs of profit or vote to narrow the inequality and bring essential utilities back into public ownership (doesn’t have to be nationalised), investing in the needs of the people.

Until then we still only have half the ingredients to share among the populace and it is not enough.