A Labour mayor has predicted that the Chancellor will offer “a spoonful of sugar along with the medicine” at next month’s Budget.
Steve Rotheram, the Mayor of the Liverpool City Region, made the Mary Poppins analogy as he warned Rachel Reeves against austerity-style cuts at the Oct 30 Budget.
Earlier this month, dozens of Labour backbenchers defied Sir Keir Starmer and Ms Reeves by abstaining on a vote on stripping the winter fuel allowance from 10 million pensioners.
The Government plummeted in popularity after the cuts cleared the Commons, and has also been hurt by a row over gifts accepted by Sir Keir and his top team from Lord Alli, a millionaire Labour peer.
Speaking the day before the start of Labour’s annual party conference in Liverpool, Mr Rotherham said: “I think there’s going to be a sort of spoonful of sugar along with the medicine.
“That will be for those areas where there’s obviously projects that we can deliver quite quickly that fit into the other manifesto commitments – so GB Energy, for instance.”
GB Energy is an £8.3 billion state-owned electricity company, which Ed Miliband, the Energy Secretary, has said could take up to five years to turn a profit.
The Government has said the scheme will be “a new, publicly-owned clean energy company that ensures jobs are created here in Britain and that we aren’t dependent on tyrants”.
Calling for a “financial settlement” for his own area, Mr Rotheram added: “It depends on what they want to do.
“If they want to go through an austerity Budget straight off without anything else then it’s going to be very very difficult for all of those MPs and all of those people… who are looking towards a different type of government. But we have to look at things over five years.”
Mr Rotheram, who was MP for Liverpool Walton before assuming the mayoralty in 2017, also had a warning for the hundreds of new Labour MPs who were elected on July 4.
“It [Westminster] can be a great place if you get the backing of all the machinery, but it can also be a very, very lonely place,” he said. “I’d say to anybody who is down there to be careful about the attractions and the shiny things that happen down there – that’s not real life.
“It can lead you down very, very dark alleys if you’re not careful – so be careful of people that you surround yourself with, be careful of the places that you frequent.”
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