Polly Toynbee

Guardian columnist

This budget will be remembered for finally abolishing the monstrous two-child benefit cap. That’s what Labour budgets do, boosting the low-paid, taking from the well-off. Children always come first, as 450,000 will be released from poverty, more than in any budget before. The chancellor reeled off Labour’s too often ignored child-first priorities: universal nurseries from nine months, breakfast clubs, more free school meals, school libraries, a youth guarantee. No, not back to 2010, but it’s progress. This doesn’t totally restore Sure Start, but in Best Start we see the beginnings of its rebirth.

After four months of tortured U-turns, dithering and leaking that spooked markets and paralysed spending, here is a far better budget than doomster predictions. But there should have been a political rolling out of the red carpet in advance to announce a redder budget than expected. Those with least got most: £900 more per year for 2.4 million people on the minimum wage. Prescriptions and fuel duty are frozen, frozen rail fares will save commuters around £300 a year. Energy bills are eased by taking the green levies back to the Treasury. It was high time to restore a little justice by taxing properties worth more than £2m. But, yes, the freezing of income tax thresholds amounts to the income tax rise that was pledged against. May all other future chancellors learn from Rachel Reeves’s original great sin, binding herself in iron fiscal chains. Never again.

Labour’s enemies will of course ferociously tear all this apart. How the opposite benches howled down abolishing the benefit cap. Alas, this dissent is backed by a majority of the public, who think scroungers have babies-on-benefits. Not so – all evidence shows it has minimal effect on birth rate. But this is a country mainly nurtured through the years on mean-minded Toryism. A Labour government now and then, with Labour budgets, reminds us that there is a better Britain that can do good. Not enough, not brave or radical enough. I don’t know if this will help reverse Labour’s desperate political misfortunes, but it should at least remind people who have lost trust what Labour governments are for. 

Julia Davies

Millionaire investor, lawyer and a member of Patriotic Millionaires

First and foremost, it is wrong to ask working people to contribute more through freezing income tax thresholds, while the wealthiest in society are broadly left untouched. In a country with such extraordinary levels of wealth at the very top, the government should be looking to those most able to contribute more, not turning to those who are already doing their part.

The additional council tax surcharge on homes worth more than £2m and higher rates on investment income show a limited willingness to move in the right direction. These steps are far too small to make any real impact on the levels of inequality we are expected to tolerate. This lack of ambition on taxing the super-rich does not meet the needs of the moment. Instead, it shifts yet more pressure on to everyone else.

If the government chooses to reverse course on today’s decisions, there is still time to create a tax system that works for everyone. What our country needs........

© The Guardian