The Real 'Benefits Street' Protecting Britain's Wealthiest

The sheer scale of outrage about plans to lift children out of poverty, by taxing millionaire homeowners, tells you everything you need to know about the priorities of the British press

Nothing tells you more about what the priorities of the British press really are than how it has collectively responded to Rachel Reeves’ Budget this week.

As I wrote for Byline Times, while it was far from perfect, there was plenty to welcome in the Chancellor’s statement on Wednesday.

From lifting hundreds of thousands of children out of poverty, to raising taxes on the harmful gambling industry, while putting more funding into the NHS, this was the most progressive Budget from a UK Government for a long time.

Yet anyone picking up a newspaper this week would have got a very different impression of what this Budget was all about.

With a predictably crushing uniformity, almost every single paper labeled Reeves’ statement as a budget for “Benefits Street”, after the particularly grim George Osborne era reality TV show.

Inside their pages, highly-paid columnists bemoaned the Chancellor’s plans for a new “mansion tax” on the most expensive 0.5% of homes, with reporters deployed to round up heartrending sob stories from Britain’s persecuted millionaire homeowners.

Newspapers which have previously filled their pages with pieces blaming young people’s Netflix subscriptions and coffee habits for their inability to buy their own homes, were suddenly filled with pieces about the supposedly intractable hardship facing Kensington pensioners in £2 million townhouses.

Particularly aggrieved by the Budget has been the the Daily Mail group, whose owner’s country estate is estimated to be worth upwards of £50 million.