Jeremy Corbyn’s problem: he had to reply to a Budget speech John McDonnell could have delivered

The reply to a Budget speech is the most difficult task for a leader of the opposition. So Jeremy Corbyn decided to ignore Philip Hammond’s speech and give the speech he always gives.

The only time the Labour leader acknowledged that the chancellor had in fact just delivered a speech was in his opening line: “Austerity is not over.” Having contradicted the entire speech in one line, Corbyn was free to resume his standard speech: modern life is awful; the Tories are to blame; Labour would make it better.

Thus he was able to condemn “tax cuts for the super rich”, as the chancellor published a chart showing that the richest 10th of the population have borne the brunt of tax rises since 2015.

He was on safer ground when he declared: “People have had enough.” The people have always had enough. They always think the government is in a mess and doing it wrong. The miracle about opinion polls is that as many as 22 per cent, for example, are “satisfied” with the way the government is running the country.

But Corbyn was rather banking on the people not paying too much attention to Hammond’s longer-than-usual speech. Despite all the partisan knockabout, blaming Labour for causing the financial crisis and mocking Corbyn’s lifetime of campaigning against nuclear weapons, the chancellor’s Budget was an aggressive theft of warehouses full of Labour policies and rhetoric.

Huge spending on the NHS; significant extra spending on universal credit, schools, policing; a tax on global tech companies; an end to PFI; an aspiration to abolish low pay – these were all things that Corbyn dreams of John McDonnell, his shadow chancellor, being able to announce from the other side of the House of Commons.

So Corbyn just pretended Hammond hadn’t said any of it. With all the oratorical skill of a repetitive bulldozer, he condemned the Tories’ record. “Far from tackling the burning injustices they have made them worse,” he said, referring to Theresa May’s words on the threshold of No 10 when she became prime minister. He accused her of having created “a two-speed society, all right for the richest few while the rest struggle”.

That may have been an effective attack on constrained public spending over the past eight, or even two, years. But now the spending taps are being turned on. “The NHS is a thermometer of the nation’s health,” Corbyn said, as if this were a clever analogy. “The illness is austerity.” But the NHS is about to receive a bigger spending boost than Labour promised in its manifesto last year. All Corbyn could do, in the circumstances, was to quote the Health Foundation saying, “It’s not enough.”

But the “end to austerity” story cuts both ways. The government can spend all the money that Labour has been calling on it to spend for years, but it will never be enough for everyone in the country, and so there will always be the chance to point to something bad happening and to say: “But you said austerity was over.”

Hence Corbyn could do no more than lay the ground for doing this repeatedly over the next few years, by calling it a “broken promise Budget”. It isn’t yet, but the way public opinion works, he can be pretty sure that is how it will be seen by this time next year.