The devil will be in the detail when it comes to the reality of the Budget

The speaker of the House of Commons, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, is angry. He says it is “not acceptable” for the government to announce its Budget measures in advance, spinning as it goes.

Sir Lindsay is right, but this habit of ignoring parliament’s prerogatives is far from new, and hardly confined to Budget measures. Indeed, for some years it has been increasingly rare for any announcement of substance to be made to MPs first. The Covid-19 pandemic, with its need for speed, has accelerated the trend.

The problem for Sir Lindsay is that there are relatively few sanctions available to him, beyond inconveniencing ministers with urgent questions and the like. At the moment, he sounds like the headmaster at morning assembly, finding that his words have little effect on his sniggering charges.

The Commons and its speaker may have to adjust themselves to reduced prestige and power in the face of a populist government that lives in permanent campaigning mode. What were once leaks have now morphed into official news releases, with the acquiescence of the government side of the Commons –  and the Lords too, for that matter. This way of doing things is (too readily) accepted as inevitable in a 24/7 news cycle – though in reality, it’s a fairly blatant exercise in manipulation. It puts the opposition at a disadvantage in terms of the coverage they can command.

It’s crucial to understand that this phased early feed of good news stories is not some exercise in public education or transparency, but to give an – ironically – misleading impression of what the Budget is about.

For some days now there has been a steady stream of upbeat, boosterish announcements affecting almost every area of life, including public pay, the minimum wage, city region transport networks, the NHS and health research, fuel duty, education and skills and so on. In fact, some of these will be re-announcements of earlier initiatives, and will be “announced” once again by the chancellor with as much flourish as he can manage, given that the public has read all about it already.

All of these stories will be covered and covered again. The Budget – an almost purely theatrical affair – has become a remarkable exercise in recycling, if nothing else. The bad news will thus be submerged.

Yet bad news there will undoubtedly be. The broad picture is of an economy with the biggest public debt and the highest tax burden since the war, wages rising only for some – and even then for all the wrong reasons – a long-standing productivity deficit, a cost of living crisis, the prospect of 5 per cent inflation and rising interest rates, and no sign of any “Brexit dividend”.

Rishi Sunak, a man who seems to live for publicity, hasn’t been talking much about how the less favoured arms of the public sector, notably local authorities, will be expected to find the 5 per cent in “efficiency savings” they are being asked to get their hands on after a decade of austerity. The chancellor is also likely to slide away from talking about the impact of another spike in Covid cases, and a further lockdown or plan B response.

One thing that has not changed about the Budget news cycle is that the inconvenient truths about the chancellor’s package of measures will only arrive with the publication of the official “red book” and associated releases, and the subsequent definitive, impartial analysis by the Institute for Fiscal Studies.

Only then will we be able to see the extent of the double counting and overstatement of the various spending boosts, the sluggish prospects for economic growth and wage growth, and the growing inequalities in society, not least after the cuts to universal credit. The truth about the Budget is worth waiting for.