ONE of the traditional rules of Budget Day is that the snap reaction of commentators to the Chancellor's speech often bears little resemblance to the narrative that takes shape after the dust has settled. So there can be no certainty at this stage over whether Rachel Reeves has successfully addressed the causes of the catastrophic drop in Labour's popularity that has been so evident in the opinion polls since they took office in July. 

Anas Sarwar will perhaps be moderately encouraged at the media's initial summarising of the Budget in terms that make it sound like a traditional Labour offering, with significant increases in public spending paid for by tax rises that will predominantly hit employers and wealthier people. If that still looks like the story in a week's time, it could play well with the left-of-centre voters in Scotland that both Labour and the SNP vie for. But the narrative could yet evolve or even turn upside down.

Polling evidence suggests one reason for the loss of confidence in the Government has been a sense that Britain's new masters are fundamentally unserious people, whose aim in politics is the accumulation of free tickets to Taylor Swift concerts, rather than transforming the UK for the better. A YouGov poll around a month ago revealed that 38% of respondents had expected Labour ministers to behave well, but believed those expectations had not been met. A separate YouGov poll in September reported that voters disappointed in Labour's performance most commonly cited the cuts in the winter fuel allowance, plus a sense that Labour had the wrong priorities and were not implementing change as promised. 

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So although Reeves could do little in the Budget to directly reverse the harm caused by the freebies scandal, she did have an opportunity to decouple that problem from the perception that the Labour Government has no true mission of change, and will hope that she has done that by repudiating austerity, and by using VAT on private school fees to partly fund boosts for the NHS and state schools.

The problem she could face, though, is that the debacle over Winter Fuel Payments may have created such an ingrained impression of Labour as a "continuity Tory" party of austerity that voters may have stopped listening to any contrary evidence. In any case, there are clearly limits to the attempts from Reeves to shield the poorest from paying the price for her spending package, because a section of her speech was devoted to sweeping cuts in the welfare bill, in part by reducing economic inactivity. This ties in with the recent borderline-dystopian comments from Wes Streeting and Liz Kendall about getting people "back to work" by offering obese people weight loss injections or by sending work coaches into mental health wards. How that will play with the public is not entirely clear. 

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Perhaps surprisingly, YouGov found this month that voters by a margin of 50% to 39% do not want unemployed people to take the hit for investment in public services, or at least not in the form of cuts to their benefits. However, that doesn't exclude the possibility that the public make a distinction between the "deserving" and "undeserving" unemployed. So while the Government's targeting of the long-term sick may be ugly politics, it's not necessarily politics that Labour will pay an electoral penalty for.

There will, though, be a penalty for Labour's ongoing support of Israel's actions in Gaza. The number of people who might actually change their vote as a result of the Gaza issue is relatively modest as a percentage of the electorate, but they are highly engaged and will have noted the irony that Reeves's commendable announcement on investing in Holocaust education was not coupled with any announcement about how the ongoing atrocities in Gaza, which many people regard as a modern-day genocide, will be tackled. Tony Blair's choice to go to war in Iraq was probably decisive in getting the SNP elected to power for the first time in 2007, and it may be that Keir Starmer's refusal to distance himself from the Netanyahu regime will play a pivotal role in the SNP winning a fifth successive term in office in 2026.