Will the tax cuts at the heart of the chancellor’s make-or-break budget give his party any hope?
Twenty-four hours before Jeremy Hunt took to the dispatch box, Birmingham city council approved what are thought to be the biggest cuts in local authority history – and it is only the latest community to reel from effective bankruptcy. Today at lunchtime, Hunt announced billions of pounds of tax cuts as a pre-election giveaway. It was akin to watching a budget from a parallel universe, in which the chancellor responded to broken public services and creaking councils by offering struggling families a slightly lower tax bill.
Frances Ryan is a Guardian columnist and the author of Crippled: Austerity and the Demonisation of Disabled People
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