Tim Davie says 14 years of reductions has put its future at risk, as he announces £200m of cuts

Cuts to the BBC’s budget by successive Conservative governments have been “shortsighted” and risked undermining its future, the director general said in a speech on Tuesday.

Announcing a further £200m of cuts to the corporation, Tim Davie said 14 years of cuts have reduced its budget by 30% in real terms and had “chipped away at our income over many years and have put serious pressure on our finances”.

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Chancellor’s unfunded proposal would be ‘work of many parliaments’ and depended on growth of economy

Jeremy Hunt has admitted his unfunded proposal to scrap employee national insurance could take more than a decade, after conceding it would require a sharp increase in economic growth to avoid making cuts to public services.

With the government under growing pressure to explain how the plan could be afforded, the chancellor told MPs on the Commons Treasury committee: “It won’t happen in one parliament, but it’s a long-term ambition.”

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Somehow the chancellor omitted to mention the main cause of Britain’s woes

On Wednesday, I watched Jeremy Hunt unveil the budget live on TV, though a carefully coordinated campaign of leaks to client media outlets meant it held little of the excitement it did in the 1970s. Where’s the fun in that? If Hunt’s 2024 budget was a 19th-century Parisienne burlesque artist, she would have walked on stage already naked and then gradually put her clothes back on, to the increasing uninterestedness of the disappointed perverts in attendance.

What an event budget day was when I was a boy! The annual release of the budget was as thrilling to me as waiting for each week’s new No 1 in the Radio 1 chart rundown. To this day still, I have a battered C60 audio cassette on which I used to tape both direct from the radio. Side one is my favourite No 1 singles from the period 1974 to 1977 – the Rubettes’ Sugar Baby Love, Windsor Davies and Don Estelle’s Whispering Grass, the Wurzels’ The Combine Harvester and the Sex Pistols’ gamechanging God Save the Queen . Side two is highlights of the then chancellor Denis Healey’s budgetary announcements from the same years. Who can forget 1974’s 10% on crisps , 1975’s ½p on a loaf of bread , 1976’s beer up one penny and 1977’s unprecedented withdrawal of the 2% national insurance surcharge on charities , a decision so radical it was essentially Healey’s own punk rock moment.

Stewart Lee’s Basic Lee is on tour in March at Darlington Hippodrome (16) and Kings Theatre Portsmouth (21)

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Whatever the Conservatives try, their huge deficit in the opinion polls isn’t shrinking

The polls will tighten. The polls will tighten. The polls WILL tighten. This has been the drumbeat banging away in the background of British politics for a year or more. It is the soundtrack when Labour ducks into a defensive crouch despite the opposition’s soaring leads. It is the tune that Tories whistle to themselves rather than surrender to complete despair about what the voters are going to do to them at the ballot box.

I have lost count of how many times I have heard angsty Labour people tell me that Sir Keir Starmer’s huge advantage in the opinion polls is bound to shrivel. This paranoia comes from Labour’s miserable track record of losing past elections it expected to win . It is further prompted by the desire to keep the party on its toes and disciplined. It is also the product of the belief, for which there is some evidence, that the electorate is much more volatile than it used to be. Morgan McSweeney, Labour’s director of campaigns, has an anti-complacency tool that he deploys against colleagues who assume that victory is already in the bag. He shows them a slide deck of election results over recent years, among them contests in Australia, America, Germany and Norway, in which there were dramatic shifts in voter support during the final leg of the race. He uses this to warn them that what the electorate are saying today is not a guarantee of what they will do in the polling booth.

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Economists say making the policy an election pledge could cost £40bn, which is badly needed for health, education and elsewhere

Rishi Sunak has been warned against fighting an election on an unfunded plan to abolish employee national insurance amid projections the move could blow a £40bn hole in the public finances.

As the pre-election battle on the economy between the Conservatives and Labour intensified, the prime minister was on Thursday under mounting pressure to explain how the measure could be afforded while public services were crumbling.

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Jeremy Hunt’s NIC cuts risk weakening the moral foundation on which Britain’s taxation system still relies

Before he unveiled his main tax cut in the 2024 budget this week, Jeremy Hunt criticised the fact that Britain collects two different types of taxes on earnings: income tax and national insurance contributions (NICs). The system has become too complicated, the chancellor said. It penalises work, he added, thus deterring a high-wage, high-skill economy. He then announced a cut in employees’ NICs by a further 2p, and ended : “Our long-term ambition is to end this unfairness … we will continue to cut national insurance.”

Britain’s tax system is indisputably complicated. The case for clarifying it as far as possible is overwhelming, in part so that it can do the job required in today’s conditions, but also so that it can command the robust public support it demands, especially in populist times. But Mr Hunt is very wrong to caricature NICs as a penalising or reactionary tax. In many ways, NICs are the very opposite.

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Exclusive: Officials fear government is ill-prepared for lobbying from wealth advisory industry after taxation overhaul

• Budget 2024: key points at a glance

The Treasury disbanded a unit tasked with offshore and non-dom tax policy weeks before announcing significant changes in the budget to the way foreign residents are taxed , sources have said.

The unit, which comprised technical experts on offshore tax issues, included specialists on non-dom policy. These officials would, according. to the sources, have been expected to help manage the implementation of a replacement for non-dom status as outlined by the chancellor this week.

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Six-month renewal of £800m scheme in England to help households facing hunger and destitution is ‘disappointing’

The chancellor’s six-month extension to an £800m support fund for the poorest households, used by councils to distribute vouchers for food, energy and water bills, will provide only a temporary fix for families facing destitution , charities have warned.

The temporary renewal of the household support fund (HSF), announced in the budget after intensive lobbying from campaigners and local authorities, was welcomed as a short-term measure that would head off immediate fears of a fresh resurgence of “holiday hunger” in the summer.

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Raising taxes and cutting public spending won’t generate the investment to lift living standards and productivity

Insanity is said to be doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. If that is the  case, then Jeremy Hunt resorting to arguments that an economy can cut its way to growth may well be judged to be mad. Mr Hunt insisted during his hour-long budget speech that his policies were working when they are not. Is it any surprise voters aren’t listening?

The audience for Mr Hunt’s austerity-infused oration in parliament was behind him. If he had voters in mind, the chancellor would have made good on Rishi Sunak’s 2022 pledge for crowd-pleasing income tax cuts. Instead, he sought to nullify the arguments of backbench critics by reducing national insurance by 2p , and playing to the gallery by quoting a discredited rightwing economic theory – the Laffer curve – that says lower tax rates for the rich will lead to higher tax revenues.

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