Badenoch called cheaper bus fares and lower electric bills a “spending spree.” She stood in a lecture hall in London and told Andy Burnham his opening moves as prime minister — a restored £2 cap on bus fares across England, a VAT cut on household electricity, reduced business rates for pubs and live music venues, more accommodation for rough sleepers, projected at around £1.8 billion — were too small for a serious government. She wants him to lift his sights to defence spending and business energy costs. She wants him to rule out tax rises at the autumn Budget. She told him to stop behaving like a mayor and start behaving like a prime minister.
I sat at my kitchen table at eleven at night running the numbers. Not on Burnham’s announcements — on my own version of the same arithmetic. Childcare for two children, $2,400 a month. Mortgage on a 1,400-square-foot rowhouse at seven percent interest. Student loan payments that tripled in eighteen months because the federal government kept rewriting the terms. The electric bill. The grocery bill. The school supplies list that arrives every August as if the calendar were not already full of things we cannot afford. Every line item on that spreadsheet is what Badenoch called “too small.” Every one of them is the difference between my family getting through the month on fumes and not getting through it at all. When a politician calls that a spending spree, she is telling every parent who has done the same math at the same hour of the night that their survival arithmetic does not count at the level of serious governance.
The arithmetic runs through the same structure in England, in different currency. Childcare in the UK averages more than £1,000 a month per child under two — among the highest in the OECD. Rent in Manchester runs around £900 a month for a two-bedroom flat; in London, considerably more. Student loan repayments take nine percent of income above the repayment threshold, deducted from every payslip, never appearing in the cost-of-living calculations politicians cite. The housing ladder my parents’ generation stepped onto in their twenties is, for most families under forty in England, a ladder they cannot reach without parental help. Council tax, groceries, transport — the items stack, and the margin shrinks, and by the time you reach the electric bill, there is almost nothing left. A VAT cut on household electricity is not a gimmick. It is the difference between that margin being tight and it being gone.
Burnham told his cabinet on Tuesday that this government needs to be “a cost of living government.” He has billed the blitz as breathing room while the bigger tax and spending decisions wait for the autumn Budget. That framing names the thing that fills the gap between what working parents were promised and what the math delivers. The gap is not an American phenomenon or a British one. It is the structural condition of raising children in countries where housing has outpaced wages for a generation, where childcare is priced as a luxury rather than built as infrastructure, and where the public systems that used to carry families — the parish school, the subsidised council housing, the bus network you could actually afford — have been defunded or privatised or priced beyond reach. Taylor Swift named the condition: “You’re On Your Own, Kid” — the bridge catalogues everything the speaker gave and lands on the recognition that nobody was coming. Badenoch’s “too small” is the legislative version of that title. The message to every parent running the numbers is: you are on your own, and the things that keep you afloat do not matter at the level of serious governance.
Badenoch’s critique is not entirely wrong. The funding question is real. £1.8 billion through savings, budget reallocations, and future taxes on “anti-social businesses” — that last phrase does enormous lifting. What counts as anti-social? When do those taxes arrive? I have watched governments of every colour promise new spending is funded and then discover months later that the numbers shifted. That scepticism is legitimate. It is also not what Badenoch said. She did not say the funding was thin. She said the ambitions were small. There is a difference between “show me the money” and “the money does not matter because the people who need it do not matter.” The first is a budget argument. The second is a moral claim about whose survival counts.
Burnham’s track record in Manchester offers something, though not everything. He kept the £2 bus fare cap locally when the Starmer government raised the national limit to £3. He has pointed to Greater Manchester’s franchised bus model — private operators bidding to run services regulated by the local transport authority — as a template for water and energy. That is structural thinking, not just cash splash. But governing a city-region and governing a country are different exercises. The bond markets will render their verdict.
My parents raised three children on a single postal-worker income in Lansdale, Pennsylvania. They sent all three of us to Catholic school. They paid off the house. They did this because the infrastructure existed — parish school with subsidised tuition, a property-tax base that funded the public alternative, a single income that covered a mortgage, employer health insurance that did not require a second job. Each of those conditions has been unwritten for my generation, and I carry the privileges that cushion the blow — college-educated parents who navigated my financial-aid paperwork, grandparents whose estate helped with our down payment, a white working-class suburban formation that still opens doors. But even with those advantages, the math does not add up to what my parents afforded on less income for more children. The Pell Grant that covered eighty percent of public university tuition in the 1970s covers twenty-five percent now. Median rents in America’s hundred largest metros have risen fifty-four percent since 2017 while earnings rose forty-three percent. Rerum Novarum held that a worker’s wages must support a family and that the economy exists to serve the household, not the reverse. The family wage is not a spending spree. It is the minimum the tradition demands.
The British version of that betrayal runs through the same structure in pounds sterling. Childcare costs among the highest in the OECD. Housing beyond the reach of most young families without parental help. A graduate tax disguised as a student loan system. Public services defunded across a decade of austerity. When Badenoch told the new prime minister his ambitions were “too small,” she told every parent in England running the same spreadsheet I ran in March 2022 that their survival math does not matter at the level of serious governance. When she said governing Manchester was “great fun” because you are “handed a big pot of someone else’s money,” she described what every mother does at a kitchen table: decide which bills to pay this month with money that was supposed to cover everything and does not. Dismissing that as fun is not analysis. It is the sound of someone who has never had to do it.
The autumn Budget will tell the story. If the savings materialise, if the tax hikes land on genuinely anti-social behaviour rather than on businesses barely surviving, if the bus fare cap holds and the electricity VAT cut shows up on real bills — then this opening move was more than theatre. If the numbers quietly deflate, if “breathing space” means a three-month reprieve before the squeeze returns — then the sceptics will have been right. But scepticism about funding is not contempt for the need, and Badenoch crossed that line on Thursday.
I am not cheering for Burnham. I am watching the way I have always watched — from the kitchen table, with the spreadsheet open, waiting to see whether the numbers add up or whether they will betray us again.