This week, however, was a story of two budgets: the one that the whole world was fixated on in Westminster and the Birmingham Council budget, which has far-reaching implications for the city’s population of over a million people.
The past few days have been spent largely ignoring the Birmingham story as I, along with the rest of the Westminster village, have been consumed with worrying about whether the chancellor will cut income tax or national insurance, implement more public spending cuts to increase tax giveaways (and create headaches for a future Labour government), or criticize the opposition’s proposal to remove tax breaks for wealthy “non-doms” who reside in the UK but have a permanent residence abroad (FYI: Hunt did not cut more off future spending plans but they did criticize Labour’s plan to eliminate non-dom plan to raise £2.7bn for tax cuts).