What to Make of Philip Hammond's Depressing Post-Brexit Autumn Statement

Wentworth Woodhouse is a Grade I listed house near Rotherham, South Yorkshire. Built by the first Marquess of Rockingham, it has the largest country house façade in Europe, running at 185 metres. With over 300 rooms covering 250,000 square feet of floorspace, it is the largest private house in the UK, and may have inspired the Darcy estate in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (source: Wikipedia). It is now, also, a key plank of Chancellor Philip Hammond's economic plan to steer a steady course through Brexit and make Britain "a country that works for everyone".

In his Autumn statement today, Hammond outlined the £7.5 million plan to save an enormous Georgian mansion built with the wealth of the Fitzwilliam dynasty, leached from the hundreds of thousands of miners who toiled in their 120 coal pits. The Chancellor complained that the massive country house had been threatened, in an "extraordinary act of cultural vandalism" in 1946, by a Labour government that authorised open cast coal mining "almost up to the front door".

The symbolism here shouldn't be ignored. Since the coal on that land was of poor quality, the mining at Wentworth was interpreted as an open act of class-war. There was something unbearably smug about a Chancellor who wants to give money and air time to the window dressing of a Georgian mansion in a country that is facing soaring inflation while wages stagnate.

Not that the government is deaf to the suffering of its people. Things have got bad enough that it's no longer the "squeezed middle" or "Mondeo man", but the "JAMs" – families that are Just About Managing – that are in need of the patronage of the ruling class. "Spread sheet Phil" is said to be not completely sold on Theresa May's plan to help these people, so it was nice of him to throw some water wings to the people thrashing about and gasping for air.

Autumn statements are designed to make front pages, and this year journalists were briefed with more headline-friendly baubles early on than usual. The one that grabbed the most attention was a ban on letting agent's fees. Letting agents have scurried out of their dens to express their rage at no longer being able to charge a one-off fee of hundreds of pounds to allow you the privilege of paying your landlord thousands of pounds for a roof over your head, and it's nice that they're pissed off. However, a lot of people have pointed out that, ultimately, any cost could be passed on to renters through higher rents. This morning, a nice man from Shelter Scotland told BBC Radio 4's today programme that the ban was already in effect north of the border, and it hadn't put any letting agents out of business there. This struck me as a disappointing way to justify a policy targeted at a type of economic activity that the world would be better off without.

Then there was the £1.4 billion for house building, to create 40,000 affordable homes. Again, that sounds good, but has been described as "painfully short of the number of affordable homes we need to solve the housing crisis and get first time buyers on the housing ladder", by Mark Hayward, managing director of the National Association of Estate Agents.

Hammond also crowed about a raise in the National Living Wage. It'll be raised from £7.20 to £7.50 in April. At this rate, George Osborne's pledge that it would rise to £9 by 2020 won't be met, and all it means is a raise from a poverty wage to a marginally-less-poverty wage, which is weird considering it's supposed to be a "living" wage.

Hammond was equally proud to announce that the personal allowance before you pay tax is going up to £11,500 in April. He said raises to the allowance since 2010 mean "we have more than halved the tax bill of someone with a salary of £15,000 to just £800." Mind you, I guess earning £15,000 would make you the kind of "Jam" who will lose £2,500 a year by 2020 thanks to benefit cuts anyway.

Overshadowing everything was a Brexit-shaped cloud – a gloomy economic outlook that was enough to make you pine for the days when George Osborne would try to keep a straight face as he told us the economy was doing really well. We lag behind in productivity, we have a housing "challenge" and there's a "damaging imbalance in economic growth and prosperity across our country", Hammond admitted, not forgetting to say that George Osborne "has a record to be proud of".

Hammond did try to dress things up a bit, hailing "an economy which has confounded commentators at home and abroad with its strength and its resilience since the British people decided, exactly five months ago today, to leave the European Union and chart a new future for our country". That couldn't mask the fact that borrowing predictions for the next five years are £122 billion higher than they were before Brexit. George Osborne's original plan was that the books would be balanced by 2015. Today, Hammond said a surplus wouldn't be created until some time in the next Parliament, which could be 2024/25. Hammond said he would go for a "flexible" approach on spending to "support the economy in the near term". He also effectively confirmed another decade of austerity. Uncertainty thanks to Brexit will mean growth is 2.4 percent lower than it would have been. Thanks, grandma! Meanwhile, national debt is heading towards £2 trillion.

Obviously we need to deal with the world of economic pain Brexit has opened up, and how better to do this than to prostrate ourselves before big business? Corporation tax will be lowered to 17 percent, the lowest rate in the G20.

There'll be a £23 billion national infrastructure fund, as well as investment in transport. This includes an Oxford to Cambridge Express way, which is apparently going to link up the "brain belt" – which sounds like some kind of streamlined breeding programme to help the over-educated political class to pro-create a new master-race.

At the end, Hammond announced that this was to be the last autumn statement. That's because the Budget – of which the autumn statement is a sickly cousin – will happen in autumn from now on. "No other major economy makes hundreds of tax changes twice a year, and neither should we," he said. So no need for an autumn statement when the Bugdet is going to be in autumn. Makes sense. But, he said, "From 2018 there will be a 'Spring Statement'." Genius: Change the autumn statement to a spring statement and the spring Budget to an autumn budget!

The Labour front bench fell about laughing. It was a weird coda, and maybe the symbolism of moving the budget to a time of year associated with death shouldn't be overlooked. But no weirder than chucking money at a Georgian mansion in the face of profound structural problems and believing that this would be a crowd pleaser. It's very much in line with the weird obsession many current government figures seem to have with Empire-era entrepreneurship. Perhaps this is how it'll go now. Future governments will pledge to build ever more statues of Adam Smith and a replica Cutty Sark for every town centre, while the sick die in hospital corridors and the homeless are tasered from the streets.

@SimonChilds13

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