It’s like the selective deafness deployed by dogs, when they’re being called by their owners but have just found a treasure trove of interesting smells to sniff at. Chancellor Rachel Reeves seems to have become selectively blind to how big the hairy scary wolf’s teeth are. But it’s a bit more complicated than that.
There was definitely something of Little Red Riding Hood in the way Ms Reeves blithely mentioned that ‘the world has changed’ in her budget-not-budget last week.
Her problem being that she simply couldn’t risk telling the story as it is. Because this is no fairy tale, and there’s no sign of a friendly woodcutter ready to come to the rescue.
So instead, she and the rest of the government are having to settle for ongoing appeasement of the wolf across the water, in the hope that he won’t go for the ‘all the better to eat you with’ option.
Switching now from allegory to reality, barely hours after Ms Reeves told an anxious parliament how she was going to balance the nation’s books, Donald Trump blew her plan to bits.
His announcement of a twenty-five per cent tax on all imports to the United States of motor cars, and we sell them lots, will cost us all the billions that she’d set aside.
And there’s worse, much worse, to come.
Exactly one week after the Chancellor’s attempt to steady the ship Donald Trump will rock it even harder with what he terms ‘liberation day’. Another huge slab of tariffs, on everything else.
If we don’t manage to wriggle out of that one then respected economists say it’ll mean Ms Reeves will have no choice, come the autumn, to slash spending further. Or whack up taxes.
Having done so on a grand scale in her budget last year in the hope – as yet unfulfilled – that it’d kickstart the economy, the last thing she’ll want is to do it all again.
Little wonder then that at the time of writing frantic talks are going on to try and persuade Uncle Sam, aka Big-teethed Wolf, to be nice to us.
Big question mark there, as the transatlantic ‘special relationship’, always a tad overstated, is now looking more like the interface between school bully and littlest boy in the class.
Attitudes were writ large last week in the revelations that emerged from what’s been dubbed ‘Signalgate’, when a journo got accidentally hooked onto a top dudes’ online chat.
Apart from the obvious and grotesque amateurism of letting such a thing happen when military options were being discussed, there were the telling asides about us lot.
The Vice President wrote ‘I just hate bailing Europe out again’, to which the Defence Secretary replied: ‘I fully share your loathing of European free-loading. It’s PATHETIC.’
His caps, not mine. Sort of says it all, really.
Although, to erase any residual doubt, consider what Marjorie Greene, one of Trump’s most outspoken backers, had to say to a Sky News hack who was asking about the cock-up.
‘We don’t give a crap about your opinion and your reporting. Why don’t you go back to your country?’
Of course the most predictable aspect of The Donald and his mob is their sheer unpredictability. Meaning all may yet be well (ish) with the British economy. Or, alternatively, worse still.
But one thing that’s definitely here for all to see is the seething discontent, among a significant slice of the parliamentary Labour party, with the benefit cuts already spelt out.
Bad enough hearing announcements that, it’s widely agreed, will push fifty-thousand kids into poverty and cost up to a third of a million physically impaired people their special payments.
What’s set to be a great deal worse is those same MPs back in their constituencies getting harangued to their faces by furious voters who’re expecting to lose out.
There is an unwilling acceptance that the welfare budget has rather spiralled out of control, what with a quarter of Britons now classified as disabled.
Also, since the Covid pandemic, two million more people say they’re struggling to function because of poor mental health.
It won’t be much consolation to them to learn that money being diverted into spending on weapons will at least create jobs.
Nor, hugely, to many other people, as it does rather sound like an executioner pointing out that getting beheaded is a sure-fire protection from migraines.
Not that there’s any getting round it, what with the US–led security rug at risk of getting whisked from under our feet. Seems the orange White House is the gift that keeps on giving. Nastily.
Even the two billion pound boost to spending on new homes, notably social and affordable housing, is not without risks.
All very well saying it’ll be lovely having new places for people to live in, but there’s still the small matter of who’ll actually get their tools out to build them. Not enough Brits know how.
Those masses of brilliant construction workers from places like Poland were more than happy to oblige in the pre-Brexit years. But the referendum put paid to that.
And, given all the fuss that gets made about immigration, it’s all a bit awkward these days.
At least while the government continues to get in a tangle on this topic, enlightened Tories are at liberty to state the obvious.
When former Conservative Chancellor Philip Hammond was asked how he would get things moving he admitted that some people might not like his answer.
‘There will have to be some additional managed migration … we will need more foreign workers in order to deliver the homes and the infrastructure that the government is proposing to build.
‘Politically,’ he added, ‘that’s going to be very challenging.’
He can say that again. A swathe of town hall elections and Starmer’s first by-election, caused by the local Labour MP duffing up a punter, are barely a month away.
And Nigel Farage’s Reform party is both gnashing its teeth at all these foreigners we keep letting in and licking its lips at all these council seats it’s likely to scoop up. As well as a new MP.
But before anyone says that Labour’s just rubbish and deserves all the kicking it gets, it is worth remembering that fings ain’t wot they used to be.
When Margaret Thatcher swept to power in 1979 she had all that lovely lolly from North Sea oil to play with, plus loads of one-off dosh from flogging off state assets.
Eighteen years later Tony Blair was able to ride the wave of the longest non-stop period of worldwide economic expansion ever.
But it all came crashing down in 2008, when a massive Ponzi-style scam in the USA came close to upending the entire global monetary system.
The Tory Chancellor ushered in a couple of years later tried to make do and mend via a cost-cutting programme of austerity that hollowed out just about every state function that we all rely on.
Little wonder then that we’re in such a parlous state now.
But while he tried to say this was a disaster made in Downing Street the truth is irrefutable. It was a catastrophe made stateside – in Wall Street.
Well there y’go. Autre jour, même merde.
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