Healey to Promise a 'New Age of Industrialisation', but No Budget Detail
The Chancellor’s first conference speech is a shipbuilding pitch rather than a fiscal one. “Our coal mines are not coming back,” he will say. “This is the new age of industrialisation.” He will confirm three floating docks at Faslane, procured through a competition open only to British yards, and £115m for a marine research vessel. He is not expected to say anything about the Budget.
Four weeks before a Budget in which he has almost no room, the Chancellor is talking about docks. The omission is the message: nothing on fuel duty, capital gains, a bank windfall tax or borrowing rules appears anywhere in the briefed extracts, which leaves him a month of speculation he has chosen not to shape. The economics underneath are unhelpful. A survey out this morning has private-sector activity falling in the three months to September and firms expecting it to keep falling, with the Confederation of British Industry’s Alpesh Paleja pointing to rising energy and employment costs and warning that “uncertainty ahead of next month’s Budget is also holding back activity”. The shadow chancellor Andrew Griffith called the plans “reheated announcements” with “no clarity on where the money is coming from”. The shipbuilding union welcomed the British-only tender warmly. Watch whether the Budget silence holds all week.