Today we’re talking about the 2025 budget from Rachel Reeves.
But instead of listing policies until your soul leaves your body, I’m going to tell you a story. A post-budget bedtime story.
Two people.
Two lives.
And a country that pretends both of them matter equally.
Let’s begin.
Meet Erin.
Full-time nurse. Single mother. Three kids. Dad’s fucked off so fast he left a cartoon dust cloud behind.
A flat that looks fine at first glance, then you notice the cracks, the mould and the windows that whistle when it’s windy.
She’s one of the millions of people politicians love to call “hardworking families” right before they empty those families’ pockets.
She wakes up, half-asleep and fully stressed.
Breakfast is chaos. One kid crying, one kid shouting, one kid refusing to put on socks.
She checks her payslip.
And it’s gone up a bit.
For fifteen seconds, she feels hope – proper hope – because with energy prices and the cost of everything rising for no good reason, even a small pay bump feels like a bloody miracle.
Then she scrolls down to the take-home number.
And the hope just… evaporates. Like the heat from her shitty flat as soon as the radiators are switched off to save a few quid.
Suddenly the “pay rise” feels like someone handed her a tenner and stole twenty on the way out.
Her gross pay went up. But what she actually gets to keep hasn’t budged.
She didn’t get a pay rise – she got a reminder that the system always gets to her money first.
Not because she did anything wrong.
Not because she miscalculated.
But because her pay rose yet the tax brackets didn’t.
Now meet Rupert.
Rupert does not get “payslips”.
He gets “portfolio summaries”.
He wakes up in a house with a staircase that exfoliates and a butler asking him how he wants his eggs.
He checks his wealth app.
His money grew again overnight.
Not because he did anything.
Not because he’s a genius.
But because he’s rich, and the world rewards that like it’s a public service.
He hears there’s a small extra tax on dividends.
A slightly higher council tax bill on one of his properties.
A tweak to pension stuff.
He reacts the same way you’d react to queueing behind someone who’s arguing about a coupon.
It does not change his life.
It doesn’t even change his lunch plans.
Back to Erin.
She goes to the supermarket with her kids who treat cereal aisles like theme parks.
Prices haven’t calmed down. Everything is still quietly rising like it’s trying to sneak past her.
But one thing helps: her youngest finally qualifies for support because the two-child limit is gone.
This actually matters in her world.
It means she’s not punished for the reckless crime of having more than two offspring.
For a second, she feels seen.
But then reality kicks back in.
Rent’s up. Petrol’s extortionate.
Everything goes up except the tax brackets that decide how little of her pay she gets to keep.
Her partner works part-time. The minimum wage increase helps. But not enough for him to pay any child support.
She feels like the government has handed her a life jacket filled with sand.
Meanwhile, Rupert goes to lunch.
The kind of lunch where the wine is older than the great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandaddy who built the slave-owning generational wealth that Rupert uses to pay.
His good friend, Richard Lionsbane, a private wealth banker at the table says the budget was “sensible” and “reassures the markets”.
What they mean is, “nothing important happened to us”. That, “our money is safe”.
Rupert isn’t worrying about frozen tax brackets because he doesn’t live off wages. He lives off assets. Which barely got touched.
He’s not filling a trolley calculating whether he can afford apple juice.
He’s not checking his meter before turning on the heating.
He’s not living in the “ordinary” world this budget for “ordinary people” claims to support.
Back to Erin’s world.
It’s the end of the month.
She gets a letter about a school trip.
Her oldest kid is buzzing.
She wants to say yes.
Of course she does.
But she has to check her bank balance first.
And ask herself what she can cut.
What she can delay.
What bill she can gamble with.
It’s not that the trip is expensive.
It’s that everything is expensive at the same time.
She sits there doing mental maths like she’s competing on some miserable version of Countdown.
Because her pay rise didn’t lift her.
It just kept her treading water.
And the frozen tax brackets dragged her back by the ankles.
She’s working.
She’s trying.
She’s doing everything right.
But the system is built so that people like her are never relaxed.
Back to Rupert.
He gets an email from his financial adviser:
“Profits look good. The new investment into infrastructure is performing well.”
He’s making money from services everyone else relies on.
Including Erin, who pays for those services with tax on the wages she actually works for.
While Rupert pays for them by owning a bit of the company delivering them.
He profits from a system Erin funds.
He does not think about this for even one second.
He moves on with his life, untouched and unbothered.
Six months after the budget, Erin is still grinding.
Still checking every price.
Still living in a world where every small increase hits her like a punch.
She’s not dramatic about it.
She just carries on.
Because what choice does she have?
Her kids are okay.
She makes it work.
She always does.
But she is exhausted in a way that doesn’t go away with sleep.
Rupert, on the other hand?
His wealth keeps climbing.
The “extra taxes” he’s paying are background noise.
He doesn’t feel squeezed.
He has never felt vulnerable.
He doesn’t feel anything the budget was supposedly meant to fix.
So what does this budget actually do?
It gives Erin a few things – but takes more.
It taps Rupert gently – but leaves his real wealth untouched.
It helps working people with one policy and penalises them with another one twice as powerful.
It protects wealth like it’s endangered and treats wages like they’re an all-you-can-eat buffet.
This isn’t fairness.
This is maintenance.
Maintenance of a gap that has been widening for decades.
Erin and Rupert don’t live in the same economy.
They don’t even live in the same reality.
But they are told the same budget “supports them”.
Erin holds the country together.
Rupert benefits because she does.
Erin works.
Rupert owns.
Erin pays tax the moment she earns.
Rupert pays tax only when his accountant’s creativity runs out.
Erin deals with every hit.
Rupert doesn’t feel hits – he feels mild weather.
Erin tucks in her kids, turns off the lights, and hopes next month is easier, knowing it won’t be.
Rupert closes his laptop, pours a drink that costs as much as Erin’s weekly shop, and sleeps peacefully in a house that never feels the cold.
Two lives.
One budget.
Long live the King and the wealth gap.
Enjoying the blog?
Why not grab a copy of the book that ties it all together, 127 Reasons Why You Are An Idiot! It's chock full of 127 hilarious, sweary, sarcastic, hard-hitting rants about everyday things that everyday idiots do, with quasi-serious, tongue-in-cheek exercises to help idiots be less idiotic.
