Revealed: The Budget speech Chancellor Rishi Sunak should deliver – Bernard Ingham

Healey, facing national bankruptcy and rampant union abuse, was forced to seek a loan from the IMF and submit the economy to IMF supervision.

Compared with that, Sunak is relatively well off.

But the Government is still spending more than it raises in tax.

Yet Boris Johnson has committed billions to the NHS, education, police, infrastructure, you name it, as if money really does grow on Jeremy Corbyn’s trees.

The Tories are also promising all sorts of daft, expensive ideas to counter climate change, such as building more subsidised wind farms on land and electric cars, without knowing where the power is coming from.

As if all that were not enough, the bills flow in from the awful floods and now coronavirus threatens the world economy just when we are trying to negotiate a post-Brexit trade agreement with a vindictive EU.

Worse still, poor old Sunak is
not thought to be his own man, 
having to dance to No 10’s profligate hornpipe.

In these circumstances, my advice to him is to demonstrate beyond doubt that he is indeed his own man – and prudent and responsible with it.

It will serve nobody, least of all in Yorkshire and the North, if we reduce our options in the face of a potential global slump.

In any case, Boris Johnson won’t want to lose another Chancellor. Now is the time to call the dictatorial Dominic Cummings’ bluff.

What then should Chancellor Sunak say when he stands up in the Commons today?

In his uncomfortable shoes he should say this by way of introduction, but I doubt he will:

Since this job was thrust upon me the bills have been piling up from exceptional flooding. Coronavirus hangs like a dark cloud over the global economy and presents the hard-pressed NHS with a new challenge. After the restraints imposed by the 2007-08 slump, not forgetting Gordon Brown’s £153bn Budget deficit, we are still running a deficit even if it is vastly reduced because of prudent Tory policies.

We are in better shape than many other countries. But my job is to make sure that we stay in good shape and can weather these latest storms. I shall not achieve that by hosing money all over the place or, much as I would like, slashing taxes. The last way to protect the Midlands and the North, whom we are pledged to help, is to run risks at this stage. Their quality of life above all depends on national prosperity.

This does not mean that our five-year spending plans to improve the NHS, education, policing and infrastructure should be put on hold. Nor does it mean that I am turning my back on tax cuts or easements necessary to bring relief to families traumatised by floods.

Instead, my first Budget is designed, while making a start on our regeneration programme, to get us through the current global crisis in reasonably good order and so pave the way for longer term investment and spending on services, infrastructure and priority regions. My aim is to do the greatest good for the greatest number – in other words to give the many a lift, not the few.

I intend to discharge that task by rigorous – but speedy – analysis of spending or the likely benefit of tax cuts and so apply both investment and spending where it can do most good. Once the money is agreed I am demanding equally rigorous control of spending. We really must take heed of the late Cecil Parkinson’s theory that once the Government gets involved the price goes up. No more.

In short, I intend to preside over
a new, tough businesslike environment where expenditure can be justified
and where cutting out waste can
help to make room for tax cuts. 
From this day I aim to end any justification for calling the Government 
a soft touch.

I recognise that my critics will say
that I am promising jam tomorrow. Members opposite may well argue 
that I am perpetuating not ending what they curiously describe as “austerity” 
in a land afflicted by obesity. Frankly, 
I don’t mind them demonstrating
their irresponsibility for everyone to
see.

In preparing this Budget I have been guided by St Mark: ‘For what shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world and lose his soul?’

I commend this Budget as the soul of responsibility. Now to the details…