Badenoch has a brilliant idea – will Reeves steal it?

It is what they call fox hunting season in Westminster, when parties race to steal their opponents’ best policies. To “shoot the fox” is to spoil the hunters’ fun. It is a brutal and ruthless sport — and so far, Kemi Badenoch is winning. Her “fox” — her pledge to abolish stamp duty — was a theatrical coup that sent Conservatives home from their conference happier than they had any right to be. And it makes a difficult Budget for Rachel Reeves even harder. When we describe this Budget as “difficult”, we are using the word in its high mandarin sense, by which a senior civil servant might advise a minister that the government may soon be entering a terminal crisis.

- John Rentoul, The Independent

Kemi Badenoch

Reeves is going to have to raise taxes substantially, having said last year that she wouldn't, and cut spending plans — if there is anything that Labour MPs will let her cut. Now Badenoch offers a tax cut which is even more popular than most, paid for by stopping the growth in welfare spending, which is also popular, except with Labour MPs, It does not alter the arithmetic facing the chancellor, but it shifts the politics further against her. The taxation of housing can move the political market. George Osborne spooked Gordon Brown in 2007, proposing in his Tory conference speech to raise the threshold for inheritance tax on the family home. Alistair Darling had to respond with a smaller tax cut in his Budget, but Brown was put off an early election — a decision that he handled so badly that he never really recovered.