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Wales left in the shadows by Labour’s Budget
The first Budget of the Labour government falls far short of addressing Wales’s needs, maintaining austerity-era policies while providing inadequate funding for critical services and infrastructure, writes LUKE FLETCHER MS
NOT ENOUGH: Rachel Reeves leaves 11 Downing Street, with her ministerial red box before delivering her Budget in Parliament, Wednesday October 30

LABOUR’S Budget will still feel like austerity to many.

The Chancellor’s recent Budget promised a clean break from Tory austerity. Labour governments in England and Wales promised a “partnership of power” — two governments working together — but there was little good news in Wednesday’s announcements for Wales.

After 14 years of relentless cuts to public services, massive transfers of wealth from public to private hands, stagnant wages not seen since the Napoleonic era, a revolving door of prime ministers and a mini-Budget that triggered a severe cost-of-living crisis, Rachel Reeves’s Budget held some promise to deliver the transformative change that, during the general election, we were told would come.

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