It’s midterm break on Kildare Street, but across the water the government of prime minister Andy Burnham faces a big test with its first budget on Wednesday. Nothing tells you as much about an administration as its budget does, but how it plays out tells you a lot about the broader politics as well. That’s as true in the UK as it is in Ireland. But the British budget also tells us a few things about Irish politics.

As Wednesday is likely to make clear, the primary opposition voice to Burnham’s Labour government is once again the Conservative Party. That doesn’t mean that the UK is reverting to a two-party landscape; it remains (like here) a multiparty system, though (unlike here) with an electoral system wholly unsuited to that reality. However, the heyday of arch-disrupter Nigel Farage has passed, and the central arguments about politics are once again dominated by Labour and the Tories. These are the eternal questions of the size of the state – how much it should do, how much it should tax to finance that, and the management of the economy that produces that taxation.

It’s not true to say nothing else matters in politics – culture does, and so do culture-adjacent issues like immigration – but usually these distributional and economic issues matter more than everything else. As British politics calms down following a period of unprecedented volatility and change, Tory leader Kemi Badenoch seems to have intuited that her party’s route to relevance is through its traditional strengths on the economy. So she has promised big cuts to welfare spending in order to finance tax cuts, a smaller state and........

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