In normal times, this was a budget that – while thin on detail, light on policy and devoid of surprise giveaways: all hat and no rabbit – would have been judged to be full of risk. In his most striking announcement, a Tory chancellor hit a core Tory constituency where it hurts, by raising the taxes of the self-employed. In normal times, Philip Hammond could have expected a bucket of tabloid ordure to be poured over his head, punishment for declaring war on white-van man and the millions of others who work for themselves.



But these are not normal times. True, Hammond was being hounded within minutes for breaking a pledge not to raise national insurance contributions that had featured in the Conservative manifesto of 2015. And the Daily Mail wasted no time in slamming the chancellor for his “brazen tax raid” on sole traders earning more than £16,000. Still, Hammond may well be calculating that he can ride out any storm.

And that’s because the normal rules of political physics are currently suspended. Put simply, this government believes it can take all manner of risks without paying an electoral price – thanks to the parlous state of the opposition. They can even jab an elbow in the eye of a group that in the Cameron/Osborne era was identified as a crucial voting bloc – those they called “strivers” – confident that those voters have nowhere else to go. The calculation is that the self-employed may hate this rise in NICs, but they’re never going to vote for Jeremy Corbyn.

Which explains why Hammond came to the despatch box with a breezy confidence that defied the image he’s cultivated during a career of unexciting performances in one dry, technocratic brief after another. He was a picture of relaxed swagger, a smile playing on his lips as he fired off a battery of decent jokes – an accountant finally loosening his tie half way through a bottle of wine.

The source of that confidence was apparent in the target of Hammond’s humour offensive. Languidly, he took a series of swipes at Corbyn and the Labour benches. Driverless cars? You lot know all about that. “They don’t call it the last Labour government for nothing,” he said. He barely broke a sweat, like a cat idly toying with a mouse that is half-dead and poses no resistance.

And if that assessment seems like arrogance on the Tories’ part, Labour did its best to vindicate it. Corbyn, grappling with the hardest part of a hard job – delivering what is meant to be the leader of the opposition’s impromptu response to the budget – could not land a punch on Hammond, even though the chancellor had all but drawn a target on his own face. Incredibly, Corbyn did not attack the Tories for breaking that manifesto promise on national insurance or speak for the millions who will be hit. Perhaps he had missed that bit. It was an open goal that Corbyn strolled past, preferring to mount his usual soapbox and give a pre-cooked – if impassioned – speech on poverty that could have been delivered at any moment in the last six years.

The result was a budget composed under no external pressure. Raising the taxes of the self-employed was only the most obvious illustration. But there was evidence throughout the speech, in both what was said and not said.

What, for example, is the factor that more than any other will determine Britain’s economic fortunes in the coming years? It’s obviously Brexit, with the triggering of article 50 imminent. But in delivering a 55-minute long assessment of – and plan for – the British economy, Hammond felt able barely to mention it, given that Labour had voted for article 50 too. A cursory reference to the EU at the start, one more later on, and that was it. It meant that the budget, and all its projections and forecasts, were predicated on an assumption that everything will carry on just as before – even though Britain is about to leave its biggest export market, an act so reckless that, we ought to remember, both Hammond and Theresa May used to oppose it.

Key points of the budget 2017 – at a glance Read more

And that was far from the only gap. When George Osborne gave these speeches, he would sweat over every number predicting future borrowing, desperate to show that the deficit was coming down year-on-year. But Hammond was relaxed when he announced that Britain will be borrowing more next year than it did this.



He could afford to be relaxed. Osborne made deficit reduction his personal brand, but the same is not true of Hammond: he does not carry that baggage. And if the government has repeatedly delayed the day when the country will go into surplus – despite those 2010 promises to reach that Eden by the end of the last parliament – who exactly is going to punish them for it? Hammond looked at the benches opposite and saw no pressure to defend himself for extending austerity for an eighth or ninth or 10th year.

The same went for social care, as the chancellor announced a mere sticking plaster of £2bn for three years and had similarly little to say about the National Health Service. Corbyn forcefully spoke about a “state of emergency” in the NHS, but Hammond could brush it off, safe in the knowledge that polls show more people trust a Tory PM to protect the health service than trust the Labour leader. The chancellor will doubtless come up with a bigger plan by the autumn. But he faced no pressure to do it now. A holding budget would do.

Even so, Hammond left a series of holes in Tory defences that would, in normal times, be easy for a functioning opposition to blast through. But these are not normal times. For now, the Tories are in the ring alone, able to swing wildly, this way and that, without fearing the consequences. And as long as it goes on, the rest of us are forced to watch an unusual experiment: government without opposition.