"Like pouring a boiling kettle into a swimming pool"

"The Chancellor delivers a Budget scene setter speech" by HM Treasury, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 

The Budget is now too close to table an ask, its content too uncertain to speculate and its consequences (potentially) too serious to act. And it’s made for a quiet autumn.

The party conferences came and went – unless you are a member of the Cooperative Party, in which case you’ll be looking forward to yours this weekend in the company of housing secretary and Labour & Co-operative MP Steve Reed.

Expo Real in Munich last month was also something of a damp squib. The UK was present but struggled to draw interest. That may have been no bad thing.

Three years ago, Liz Truss’s mini-Budget clouded conversations; a year later the cancellation of HS2 forced the then mayor of the West Midlands, Andy Street, to reverse his plans to attend. Last year, August’s first interest rate cut of the cycle drove speculation about how far and how fast rates might come down. Optimism was dampened by a less than assured start by the new government. Plus ça change, you might say.

But in contrast to the lack of attention paid to the UK was the dismay directed towards France, whose prime minister resigned mid show, leaving a national delegation reeling. Meanwhile, German delegates, the vast majority of those exhibiting and pacing the halls of Messe München, were putting a brave face on a lacklustre investment market. (“Like pouring a boiling kettle into a swimming pool,” said one international investor, whose efforts to identify signs of positivity failed to make an impact.)

Rachel Reeves is unlikely to do anything to do much to lift the mood on 26 November (yes, I know I said I wouldn’t speculate, but I am hardly going out on a limb here) but there’s an important lesson she can take from this year’s pre-Budget experience.

It’s comms 101 really.

It was Philip Hammond who moved the government’s main Budget to the autumn, with the first taking place on 22 November 2017. Last year’s Budget was on 30 October, 2023’s on 22 November, 2022’s five days earlier, and 2021’s on 27 October. The 2020 Budget was all but cancelled (Covid) as was 2019’s (scheduled for 6 November and canned after a general election was called). 2018’s was back in October.

Dates may have bounced between October and November but none has been as late as 26 November and no chancellor has allowed as many as the 84 days between announcement and delivery we’re currently enduring. “Hampering decision making,” is at the more polite end of comments I’ve heard about the experience.

Seventeenth-century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza put it better: “Speculation, like nature, abhors a vacuum.” It births inertia too.