There was a big loser in the Budget... the private sector that will have to pay for it all

In Rachel Reeves’s Budget, there was one huge winner.

- CHRIS BLACKHURST

Much of what she announced was directed at boosting the public sector, specifically health and education. Their workers have been handed tens of billions in extra investment, to go with the pay rises they seem to get just by asking, and their gold-plated pensions.

There was a loser: the private sector that is going to pay for it all. If ever there was an indication of the shift in the fiscal balance of power it came yesterday afternoon. The party that once had one of its stars say how Labour was “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich” now wishes to clobber them. How hollow Peter Mandelson’s words appear today.

His was the administration under Tony Blair that embraced the wealthy, falling over itself to attract them to relocate and invest in Britain, welcoming many as non-doms. Not this incarnation.

To hear Paul Nowak, the TUC general secretary, crowing after Reeves’s address, telling bosses to live with the increase in employer’s national insurance by cutting their profits and dividends, said everything. His members would continue to press for higher wages, and woe betide anyone who tried to use the NI hike as an excuse for not complying.