New Tories, New Labour

Hunt's financial statement was straight out of the Gordon Brown playbook.

The adults are back in the cabinet room, but are they back in the country? We've been through a decade in which the normally sober British electorate chose to live, well, a bit dangerously. It was a very British form of populism

Brexit was the biggest gamble on economic futures since the Darien Scheme bankrupted Scotland before the Union. Then there was a torrid affair with a charismatic blond bombshell with reckless habits and a silver tongue. After Boris we had a kind of BDSM government of the libertarian right. Fifty Shades of Liz Truss: the dominatrix with the thousand yard stare. Painful and mercifully brief.

Now the Tories have set the clock back twenty years to the era of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Yes, the new Conservative government is essentially a New Labour tribute act. Listen to Rishi Sunak with the vision off and you hear the soothing tones of Tony Blair. It's as if he'd been listening to tapes in his bath.

And we have the pure, dead centrism of the Chancellor, Jeremy Hunt - Gordon Brown without the wit. His budget – let's call it what it was – was pure Brown circa 2003/4. Stealth taxes on middle income earners; lots of fiddly changes to business taxation that bore journalists, a blatant bung to the banks reducing their surcharge. It was carefully pre-spun as a ruthless Tory assault on the poor and public services which on the day delivered the biggest increases in pensions and benefits for thirty years.

Then we had education, education, education and the NHS getting a real terms funding increase. So blatant has been the rip off that the New Tories have even employed two of Tony Blair's hench-people: Sir Michael Barber, who headed New Labour's delivery unit, is to investigate whatever happened to British skills. The former Labour Health Secretary, Patricia Hewitt, will ponder NHS administration. Their seats in the House of Lords are being kept warm.

Real present day Labour will have a hell of job trying to build a manifesto now that the Tories have pinched the Brown playbook. Taxes are at their highest level since the 1950s. The top rate of tax was not only restored by Hunt but increased. A record increase too in the National Minimum Wage, and a second windfall tax on the energy companies.

Since Labour has promised not to increase income tax or VAT, or return to the EU single market, it looks like Keir Starmer may have to pay for his £30 billion green growth plan with hot air. Or National Insurance which of course remains unhiked.

The Shadow Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, was reduced to peeving about non-doms, typically foreign capitalists, who pay tax in their home countries rather than here. Would Gordon Brown have allowed Ireland and France to steal them from London with their versions of non-domicile tax status? I doubt it. When he was in office, Labour too allowed non-doms to remain in Britain for a nominal sum.

Non-doms aside, the Hunt-Sunak prospectus probably makes sense politically. It's how the British people like to see themselves; compassionate, progressive, fiscally responsible. But it may not be a land they much enjoy living in. The coming recession will bring the greatest fall in living standards since records began: 7%, according to the Office for Budget Responsibility. This follows the longest pay pause since the Napoleonic Wars. Those Tory superlatives just keep coming.

Hunt has taken a wrecking ball to the living standards of the middle classes, the bedrock of Tory support. They will pay the bulk of the tax increases through the original Brownite stealth tax: fiscal drag. Millions more will find themselves paying the higher rate of tax in future years because of frozen thresholds. Torsten Bell, the Today programme's commentator of choice, normally lambasts the government for being cruel to claimants; this time he was attacking them for squeezing better off.

Having children in the UK is ruinously expensive because child care costs are through the roof. Maybe that's why Hunt has had to relax immigration: to replace the workers Britain is too poor to raise itself. Actually, he didn't have to raise it since immigration has remained at well over 200,000 a year since Brexit. The number of work and study visas has actually increased, despite the whinging from Brexiteers like the Wetherspoon boss, Tim Martin, that he can't staff his pubs.

Will this save the Tories from defeat in 2024? I don't believe so. Someone has to pay the price for economic failure and after 14 Tory years it will be hard to argue that it isn't time for a change. Things couldn't be much worse. But it brings to a close Britain's populist decade of the right and the left: from Nigel Farage to Jeremy Corbyn; Liz Truss to Boris Johnson. We may never see their like again. It's back to boring managerialism.