So the budget was duly delivered - or what was left of it, after so much had leaked out!

    In fact the biggest "shock" was the accidental publishing of its contents by the Office of Budget IrResponsibility, before Rachel Reeves had a chance to pull any rabbits out of her hat at the despatch box!

    But even without the OBR leak, there would not have been any rabbits. Predictably, the two-child benefit cap is now gone. Labour MPs waved their order papers in approval - since clapping isn't allowed. But will this really lift nearly half a million families out of poverty?

    An extra £17.26 per week per child might just about keep the wolf from the door - and it might even help poor families keep the heating on a bit longer this winter. But it is not much of a lift, given the general rise in the cost of living: if your family food bill is £100 a week, it's already gone up by £25...

    In fact the budget - as always - was really aimed at the financial markets. And they were not bothered - hardly twitched, in fact, at any of the Chancellor's measures. Which kind of says it all.

    As for the big scandal made by Sky News and others (and not to forget, Nigel Reform Farage and the stand-up comedy of Kemi Badenoch) about "broken election manifesto promises" on tax rises, well, one has to wonder why they should care in the first place? Since when do they represent Labour's "disappointed" electorate?

    Then again, as far as the interests of the "working people" that Reeves and others keep referring to, yes indeed, wouldn't it serve these interests best if public spending - funded by big tax rises on the rich - went up? Because, quite obviously, this is what pays for schools, the NHS, and all other public services! And they are habitually, whether under Labour or Tory, starved of funds in order to make concessions to the capitalist class, who all these politicians serve...

Not squeezing the rich...

And what would happen if tax was raised for the wealthiest? The richest 350 people in Britain "own" nearly £800bn. Reeves could quite easily have found, in their pockets, the £22bn needed to balance her books! And if Corporation Tax had been increased, say from the current 25% to 35% (the same level Thatcher had it at the end of her tenure), she could have raised an additional £15bn!

    None of these measures would significantly have dented the wealth of the richest. But never mind, the bosses already complain so loudly against taxes, one would think they were in danger of becoming homeless, or having to turn up at a food bank!

    However the press and the political opposition all take opportunity - as they would - to criticise tax rises, and claim that this is bad for the economy and that employers, who were already upset last time round when their National Insurance Contributions went up, will leave the country.

    This is a bit of a fallacy. The OBR's assessment pre-Budget actually showed that tax revenues were up since the Spring Statement. Meaning that the capitalists must have mostly stayed put!

    As for the interests of working people - aka working c/ass - it's pretty hilarious that people like Farage and Badenoch claim to stand for our interests. They talk about the rest of us being outraged at having to "pay" for the unemployed on welfare benefits - who apparently "don't want to work".

    Which of course, is their childish game of trying to set workers against each other. As if the real guestion today isn't "why are the too few jobs on offer all precarious, and paid on the minimum wage?"!

Keeping the energy giants happy...

    One thing Rachel Reeves did promise was that £150 might come off our energy bills, due to the scrapping of green levies - but it's not clear who exactly will benefit and by how much... Certainly these bills are one of the biggest costs faced by everyone these days.

    Indeed, long forgotten are the days when gas and electricity were provided by the state. Today everybody is paying huge levies instead, to some of the richest private companies in the world! So much so, that nobody thinks of an energy bill as a necessary "tax", anymore, as it used to be, up until the 1980s...

    What would it take for these utilities to be renationalised? It would certainly allow the price of energy to be controlled, instead of it floating in an ever-upward spiral! Yes, the sell-off of gas and electricity 40 years ago, unlike the railways, which are being renationalised only because privatisation failed, provided the capitalist class with an ever- growing goldmine...

    But no "working person" should expect Reeves nor anyone else to upset the capitalist economy in any shape or form. That's the future task of "working people" - our class - to overturn this poverty- perpetuating system, altogether.