Budget 2025
Repeating old mistakes, or a pivot toward the future?
Introduction
The UK’s Autumn Budget 2025 arrived amid high expectations and deep anxieties about Britain’s economic direction. Chancellor Rachel Reeves billed it as “a Budget for fair taxes, strong public services, and a stable economy,” emphasising growth through “stability, investment and reform”. As the author of a series on capitalism’s decline and the need for an “engineered” alternative, I read this budget as a litmus test: Would it merely prop up late-stage capitalist metrics like GDP, or take bold steps toward a fairer, future-proof economic design?
The answer is mixed. On one hand, Reeves’s plan makes unprecedented nods toward equity – from new wealth taxes to lifting children out of poverty – that deserve praise. On the other, it clings to growth-at-all-costs logic and market appeasement, reinforcing some of the very dynamics driving inequality and stagnation. This analysis will explore both the budget’s bright spots of redistribution and public investment, and its darker allegiance to outdated metrics and elite interests. In doing so, we’ll see how far the UK has come toward “engineered capitalism,” and how far it still has to go.
Steps Toward Fairness and Universal Provision
To the budget’s credit, there are glimmers of a more equitable, service-oriented economic model. Most striking is the removal of the two-child limit on welfare benefits, a policy that since 2017 has denied support to families for any third or subsequent child. Reeves announced this cap will end from April 2026, a change expected to reduce the number of children in poverty by 450,000 by 2029-30. In fiscal terms, it’s a £3 billion+ yearly commitment to society’s poorest, a clear victory for basic decency over bean-counting. As someone who has argued that late-stage capitalism starves the young and poor, I applaud this move. It directly reallocates resources to those who need them, in line with the principle of universal basic support for children. Reeves herself defended it in moral terms, saying “I don’t think children should be punished by this pernicious policy any longer”. Ending the two-child cap is more than a welfare tweak – it’s a signal that human well-being (and future productivity) matter more than arbitrary austerity rules.
The budget also took tentative steps toward taxing wealth and high incomes, after decades in which capital gains and property went undertaxed. In the 2024 budget, the new government had already targeted asset-based privilege – for example, ending the non-dom tax loophole (expected to raise £39.5 billion over the forecast) and charging VAT on private school fees. The Autumn Budget builds on this with what is essentially a mansion tax: a High-Value Council Tax Surcharge on luxury homes. Starting in 2028, owners of properties worth over £2 million will pay an extra £2,500 per year (rising to £7,500 for £5 million-plus mansions). Fewer than 1% of properties will be affected, but it corrects a glaring unfairness: currently an average family home in England pays more council tax each year than a £10 million Mayfair townhouse.
This new levy will raise an estimated £400 million annually by 2029. Modest, but symbolically significant. It marks the UK’s first real attempt at a property wealth tax, asking those with palatial assets to contribute to the commons. For a proponent of “engineered capitalism,” which demands limits on elite accumulation, this is a welcome crack in the edifice of wealth preservation.
Other tax changes further rebalance the scales between capital and labour. Dividend income tax rates will rise by 2 percentage points for basic and higher-rate payers (to 10.75% and 35.75% respectively) from next year, narrowing the gap between taxes on wealth and taxes on work. Similarly, starting in 2027, rental property income will face its own tax bands – 22% basic and 42% higher rate – slightly higher than the standard rates, to ensure landlords pay a fairer share. These tweaks, alongside a cut to the tax-free ISA savings allowance (down from £20k to £12k for under-65s), signal an overdue principle: those living off assets should shoulder more of society’s costs. Indeed, the Treasury forecasts that increases in property, dividend and savings taxes will raise £2.2 billion in 2029-30, with around two-thirds of that coming from the top 20% of households. For once, policy is nudging the ultra-wealthy to give back some of the gains that an imbalanced system has heaped upon them.
Meanwhile, the budget shores up universal services and public investment, gestures toward what I’d call a proto-UBS (Universal Basic Services) approach. The NHS in England will get 250 new Neighborhood Health Centres to cut waiting lists, and prescription charges are being frozen at £9.90 instead of rising with inflation. (In fact, the government proudly notes this keeps prescriptions “under a tenner” – a small but psychologically important win for patients.) There’s even a new commitment that all women will have free access to the morning-after pill at pharmacies, a noteworthy expansion of reproductive healthcare.
On transport, regulated rail fares are being held down, and a 5p fuel duty cut (in place since COVID) is extended to late 2026, tempering travel costs. Though as we’ll discuss, the fuel duty freeze is a double-edged sword. The budget also continues rolling out free childcare, with over half a million children now benefiting from funded nursery places as eligibility expands. And in a nod to education equity, it maintains plans to charge VAT on private school fees (initiated earlier) so elite schools pay tax like others. Each of these measures, from healthcare to transport to childcare, moves the needle toward an economy where basic needs are at least partly de-commodified. They echo the idea that a modern society should guarantee essential services – health, education, mobility – as rights, not privileges.
Even the business tax reforms carry a hint of social rebalancing. Reeves announced changes to commercial property rates that raise taxes on warehouses and large online retailers while permanently cutting rates for 750,000+ small shops, pubs, and leisure venues. In effect, Amazon’s depots will pay more so your local high street shop can pay less. A corrective to the skewed advantages big e-commerce has enjoyed. Likewise, the budget caps a generous pension tax perk that mostly benefitted high earners: from 2029, only the first £2,000 of employer pension contributions via salary sacrifice will be exempt from National Insurance, ending an unlimited loophole and netting an extra £4.7 billion a year. By closing such reliefs “that favour individuals with higher earnings or wealth”, the government aims to make tax treatment more equal. These are technocratic fixes, but they align with the ethos of engineered capitalism: tuning the system’s levers to distribute rewards more broadly and curb the excesses of the top 1%. After years when policy seemed oblivious to extreme inequality, it’s refreshing to see a budget explicitly framed around asking “those with the broadest shoulders to contribute more”.
Budget 2025, if read optimistically, contains the beginnings of a paradigm shift: a recognition that fairness and social stability must be engineered, not left to trickle-down fantasies. Higher taxes on mansions, dividends, and corporate giants; investments in public clinics, childcare, and cost-of-living relief. These moves inch us closer to the “modified capitalism” I’ve written about, one that preserves innovation but tempers its harms through redistribution and universal services. Reeves’s £26 billion in tax rises this year (on top of £40 billion last year) constitutes the largest back-to-back increase by any new government on record. That took political courage. And crucially, much of that revenue is being ploughed into social spending: not just plugging budget holes but lifting up those left behind. If late-stage capitalism is defined by sky-high inequality and under-provision of basics, this budget – at least in part – tries to turn that tide. For that, it earns praise.
Growth Metrics and Short-Termism: Old Wine in a New Bottle
Yet for all the progressive flourishes, the budget’s foundational logic remains tied to the old engine of capitalism. The same engine which I’ve argued is sputtering. The Chancellor might speak of “fair taxes” now, but in virtually the same breath she insists Britain will “relentlessly pursue growth”. The overarching aim is still to satisfy the traditional metrics: GDP up, deficits down. Reeves crowed that the UK beat forecasts and is on track to be the second-fastest growing G7 economy, as if growth alone signifies success. This growth-fetishism is a bipartisan article of faith, but one my work, and a growing body of evidence, deeply questions. The budget doubles down on chasing GDP, even as evidence mounts that advanced economies cannot sustain the kind of growth we once had, at least not real growth that benefits the many.
In fact, much of what passes for “economic growth” today is what I’d call statistical momentum: an increase on paper that masks a stagnating real economy. As I noted in a previous article, “Much of what we record today as ‘growth’ is not genuine increase in productive output or welfare, but rather the side effects of concentration, inflation, and accounting.” Britain’s latest uptick exemplifies this. The independent OBR (Office for Budget Responsibility) revised 2025 growth up to 1.5% (from 1% forecast earlier), but why? Largely because higher inflation is boosting nominal tax receipts and GDP, not because factories are suddenly more efficient or families more prosperous.
Reeves herself got lucky: surging prices fattened Treasury coffers enough that she met her debt rule without radical measures. It’s Pyrrhic progress – inflation-driven growth that feels nothing like prosperity on the ground. Real wages are only just crawling upward after years of erosion, productivity is flatlining (OBR slashed the outlook), and household consumption remains fragile. Indeed, the OBR’s entire fiscal forecast now hinges on a big drop in the household savings rate; essentially betting Britons will spend down their meagre savings to propel growth. This assumption has “repeatedly failed” in the past, and for good reason: after decades of wage stagnation, many households have no fat to trim.
In clinging to impossible growth optimism, the budget ignores the new reality of late capitalism: we’ve built an economy optimized for wealth retention, not circulation. Money pools at the top, while everyone else struggles to afford basics. That’s why tax cuts or incentives often fizzle: the wealthy already spend as much as they want, and the non-wealthy can’t spend more because they’re broke. Yet Reeves’s plan still assumes a “virtuous cycle” can reboot: stimulus now, growth returns, and all will be well. She is injecting a mild fiscal stimulus over the next two years (~£7.5 billion a year) to shore up demand, then plans sharp belt-tightening after 2027 to hit her 2030 balance rule. This pattern – spend now, slash later – has a whiff of political expediency (no tough choices before the likely 2029 election) rather than genuine economic rethinking. It feels like tweaking the timing of the same old formula in hopes the engine will magically run smoothly by 2030. But as I’ve argued, the engine itself is broken. Productivity gains no longer translate into broad wage growth; they often just enrich shareholders via automation. Debt-fuelled consumption can’t continue indefinitely when private debt and costs of living are already crushing. Asset price inflation doesn’t create real wealth for society, it just makes housing and essentials less affordable while giving paper gains to those who already have assets. The budget largely sidesteps these structural issues.
Yes, Reeves is raising taxes on asset-owners, as discussed. A necessary correction. But notice where the budget does not stray: it doesn’t truly challenge the primacy of GDP growth or the financial sector’s outsized influence. The Chancellor’s proudest boast was expanding her fiscal headroom to £22 billion, mainly to mollify bond markets. She took pains to reassure “jittery” investors by sticking to an “ironclad” rule of balancing the budget by 2030. In practice, this meant rejecting any larger long-term investments or social programmes that might have dented those targets. For example, some economists have urged a massive green investment push or genuinely transformative infrastructure outlays while borrowing costs are elevated but manageable. Instead, apart from completing already-planned projects (Lower Thames Crossing, etc.), the budget offered no ambitious new spending to drive future growth (like major clean energy expansion). Even the OBR noted the budget still lacks ambitious measures to boost growth in the long run. This caution is meant to keep the City happy, but it betrays a lack of vision beyond appeasing short-term market metrics.
The risk is that by 2029, we end up with neither genuine growth nor fiscal stability, just an exhausted consumer, an election-focused giveaway hangover, and still-spiralling inequality. In the worst case, if the economy underperforms (not unlikely, given global headwinds and our structural drags), Reeves or her successor would need yet more “tax raids” or spending cuts to fill the gap. That reactive approach is the hallmark of a government still captive to late-capitalist boom-and-bust, rather than one engineering a new steady-state prosperity. In short, the Budget remained tethered to a growth illusion, papering over fundamental cracks with optimistic forecasts and inflationary gloss. It has not heeded the call to redefine success beyond GDP – say, in terms of median well-being. And until that changes, we’re still steering by a faltering compass.
Retaining Elite Power and Superficial Fixes
Another concern is that, for all the talk of fair contribution, the budget pulls its punches against the truly entrenched elite. Yes, the wealthy will pay a bit more tax, but will these moves seriously dent inequality or just trim its excesses? The lion’s share of new tax revenue actually comes from broad-based measures like freezing income tax thresholds until 2031. This stealth tax drag will raise a hefty £23 billion by 2030, and while it’s true that higher earners contribute more of that (the top half of households will pay 75% of the yield), it still quietly shifts the burden onto workers across the board through inflation.
Meanwhile, certain bolder ideas to rein in extreme wealth are nowhere in sight: no explicit wealth tax on millionaires’ net worth, no cap on CEO pay ratios, no measures to break up corporate monopolies or limit outsized profits. The City of London’s financial sector emerged relatively unscathed (some loopholes closed, but no new transaction taxes or serious regulation of speculative capital). One could argue the budget reinforces elite retention by what it didn’t do – it doesn’t fundamentally challenge how billionaires and big firms accumulate and retain wealth, beyond some tax tweaks.
Even some of the ostensibly progressive measures have loopholes or delayed onsets that soften their impact. The new high-value property surcharge only kicks in in 2028 by which time, who knows, a future government or lobbying effort could water it down or reverse it. The extra property and dividend taxes start in 2026-27, again largely beyond the immediate horizon. By back-loading these changes, the budget gains revenue on paper but leaves ample time for the wealthy to adapt or for political winds to shift. A cynic might say it’s a “jam tomorrow” approach to taxing the rich, while the pain of threshold freezes for ordinary taxpayers is happening right now (wage inflation is already dragging more low-earners into paying tax each year).
It’s also worth noting how superficial GDP boosts via asset inflation remain a feature. Britain has long propped up growth by inflating assets. Think of the housing market, where rising prices make homeowners feel richer and spend more, even as affordability for others collapses. This budget doesn’t overtly stoke a housing boom (indeed it claims to fix planning to build more homes), but it’s instructive that the Chancellor celebrated rising house prices as a fiscal saviour: higher stamp duty and inheritance tax receipts from asset appreciation are a key reason her books balance. We’re still betting on paper wealth effects. The OBR now forecasts capital gains tax revenues will more than double to £30 billion by 2030; a lot of that is just more expensive houses and stocks, not real new production.
Relying on those gains is risky: asset markets can deflate, and they enrich a minority even as they contribute to GDP. It’s a far cry from a sustainable growth model rooted in broad-based productivity or innovation. In my view, circulation-based capitalism – where money velocity among the many drives growth – has given way to retention-based capitalism, where wealth gets stuck at the top and “growth” comes from their assets swelling. This budget, while tweaking taxes on those assets, doesn’t fundamentally break that pattern. It doesn’t, for instance, propose aggressive public investment in labour-intensive sectors or new forms of income distribution (like a sovereign wealth fund paying dividends to citizens). It largely leaves the engines of financialisation humming in the background, hoping that a nip here and a tuck there will suffice.
In fairness, Reeves had limited fiscal room and immense political constraints. The fact she raised taxes at all on the rich is progress. But a truly systemic redesign – the kind needed to reverse late-stage inequality – would likely involve measures far beyond what mainstream politics has yet embraced: stringent caps on annual income or wealth growth for the ultra-rich, public stakes in emerging tech monopolies, perhaps even experiments with maximum wage ratios as I’ve advocated. Nothing so radical surfaced in this budget. And so elite wealth remains largely secure. The richest will pay a bit more tax but continue accumulating far faster than the economy grows, exacerbating the gap. For example, no policy here prevents corporations from using increased profits to buy back shares or shower executives with stock options. Yet these are practices that fuel asset inflation and concentrate wealth. The budget’s narrative is about fairness, but its reality still trusts the elite-driven status quo to deliver private investment and growth if we just tweak incentives. That is conventional thinking, and it underestimates how fundamentally our system is misfiring.
Climate and the “Thermodynamic Limit”
One glaring blind spot in the budget, and in the growth obsession generally, is the ecological and thermodynamic reality we face. True to late-capitalist form, the budget at times treats the real world (of energy, resources, and climate) as an afterthought to the financial one. Nowhere is this clearer than in the handling of energy and climate measures, which can best be described as schizophrenic. On one hand, Reeves announced relief for households on energy bills, moving some renewable levies onto general taxation and ending a green home improvement scheme, to cut typical bills by about £134 a year. This responds to public outcry over soaring energy costs, and short-term it eases pressure. But on the other hand, that very move slashes support for energy efficiency: the scheme being ended (the ECO program) was helping retrofit homes for insulation and lower energy use. In effect, the government chose an immediate political win (cheaper bills now) at the expense of long-term savings and emissions cuts that efficiency would bring.
This is the kind of short-term circulation boost, putting money back in consumers’ pockets to spend, that ignores a thermodynamic limit: you cannot keep consuming more fuel (or foregoing efficiency) without running into physical and climate constraints. The budget’s energy manoeuvre simply shifts costs around and delays our climate investments, likely making the eventual transition more expensive.
Similarly, Reeves froze fuel duties yet again for petrol and diesel, extending a 5p per litre tax cut that was meant to be temporary. Politically, this avoids angering drivers; economically, it curbs inflation a tad. Environmentally, it’s a step backwards. Cheap fuel encourages consumption and undermines the price signal to shift to cleaner transport. The budget does plan to gradually restore that 5p duty cut by 2027 and hints at reversing previous freezes, but given the history since 2011 (UK governments repeatedly cancel scheduled fuel duty rises due to political pressure), one can be sceptical. Burning more fossil fuel to bump up GDP is literally subject to thermodynamic limits: the carbon budget and planetary warming don’t care about Westminster’s fiscal rules. Yet the budget treats fuel duty primarily as a revenue question and a consumer issue, not part of a climate strategy.
The government did announce an Electric Vehicle road tax from 2028 (3p per mile on EVs) to make up for lost fuel duty. It’s sensible to start planning for an EV-heavy future where drivers still contribute to road upkeep. But even here, note the emphasis: replacing lost revenue, rather than accelerating EV rollout. And shockingly, the budget unveiled “transitional energy certificates” to enable new North Sea oil and gas drilling at existing sites. In a year when the world’s climate scientists pleaded for an end to new fossil fuel expansion, the UK is finding creative ways to prolong oil extraction. This is justified as energy security, but it underscores a disconnect: the budget’s growth model still partially banks on oil, gas, and consumption that the planet cannot sustain indefinitely.
In broader terms, the budget speech did not question the sustainability of perpetual growth in a finite system. There was no mention of decoupling GDP from carbon emissions, no new investments in renewable energy beyond existing plans (like ongoing nuclear projects which got a mention). While Reeves talked about cutting inflation and debt, she did not talk about cutting carbon with anywhere near the same urgency. The one climate-positive nugget was moving some renewable subsidy costs off energy bills and into general taxation – essentially socialising the cost of green transition, which is fair and progressive. But even that was a temporary three-year measure possibly timed to ease things before an election.
From the perspective of modernising our economy, this is disappointing. A truly modern economic blueprint would integrate planetary boundaries and energy transitions at its core. It would treat climate action not as a cost to minimise or defer, but as an investment and a necessity for long-term stability. In thermodynamic terms, our economy is an open system drawing down finite low-entropy resources (fossil fuels) and dumping entropy (pollution). Endless growth on this basis is a physical impossibility. A budget that was serious about redesigning capitalism would begin shifting the focus from quantitative growth to qualitative development – improving efficiency, resilience, sustainability, even if that means GDP growth rates decline. We see little of that thinking here. Instead, we see a hope that a bit of green tinkering can coexist with largely business-as-usual growth. This “have your cake and eat it” approach might hold for a few years, but eventually reality (in the form of climate impacts or energy crises) imposes limits. When that day comes, a fiscal strategy reliant on traditional growth will unravel. Unfortunately, the Budget doesn’t fully confront this coming reckoning. It treats climate commitments as secondary to the immediate economic scoreboard.
Automation and AI: Missing the Bigger Picture
Finally, let’s talk about technology – especially AI and automation – which is rapidly reshaping economic reality. My articles have argued that AI is accelerating the decoupling of productivity from employment, enabling huge profits and output gains with far fewer workers. This trend, if unmanaged, concentrates wealth (to tech owners) and erodes the wage-based distribution that capitalism traditionally relied on to fuel demand. “Engineered capitalism” would proactively address this, perhaps via universal basic income, public tech dividends, or democratising access to AI so everyone can benefit from the new productivity. So, how does the Budget measure up on this front? In truth, it barely scratches the surface.
Reeves’s budget speech and documents made surprisingly scant reference to technology or AI, especially given the global hype. There were some generic promises: for instance, the government touted the creation of “AI Growth Zones” – tech hubs in regions like South Wales – with partnerships from companies like Microsoft and £10 billion of private investment “unlocked”. Each zone gets a token £5 million of public funding. And the Treasury is backing a Sovereign AI Investment Fund of £500 million to support UK AI startups. These moves indicate the state wants a foothold in the AI race, nudging investment to certain areas and trying to seed a domestic AI hardware industry.
Fine. But this is industrial policy, not social policy. It’s about boosting the UK’s AI sector (perhaps to generate growth and jobs), not about ensuring AI’s benefits are widely shared among the population. The budget does nothing to democratize AI access in the way I have envisioned (e.g. making advanced AI tools publicly available like a utility). There is no discussion of regulating AI monopolies or preventing Big Tech from hoarding AI capabilities. In fact, by celebrating massive private investments (like NVIDIA’s £2 billion in UK AI, noted by the Science Department), the government almost implies the bigger the corporate stake, the better. That risks entrenching a tech elite who will derive the lion’s share of AI’s profits. A dangerous game for a technology which could one day replace most human labour.
On the labour side, the budget’s response to automation’s challenges is limited to skills and apprenticeships. It extends the existing Youth Guarantee – offering every 18–21 year old an apprenticeship, training or education opportunity – and even makes apprenticeships free for under-25s at SMEs. This is commendable as far as helping young people adapt. A more skilled workforce is certainly part of the solution. However, skills alone won’t save us if AI drastically reduces the need for human workers in many fields. We could end up with highly skilled people and too few jobs that require them. The budget does not engage with that possibility. There’s no hint of Universal Basic Income or Job Guarantee schemes to support those displaced by automation, ideas increasingly floated in policy circles. By ignoring such ideas, the Budget assumes, implicitly, that employment will remain robust if the economy grows. This is exactly the 20th-century paradigm that may not hold in an AI-dominated 21st century.
Financialisation and automation together mean we can generate plenty of output with few workers, and the gains accrue to owners of capital (robots, algorithms, patents). That’s a recipe for inequality unless we redesign distribution. The Budget’s modest redistribution is a start, but probably not enough to counter the tidal wave of inequality tech could generate. For instance, increasing dividend taxes by 2% will not significantly dent Mark Zuckerberg’s or OpenAI’s fortunes (especially as those are largely unrealised equity wealth). Nor will a £7,500 levy on a Mayfair mansion alter the power structures. Meanwhile, no measures were introduced to give workers more claim over AI-driven productivity, such as policies supporting co-ownership of data or algorithms, or higher corporate taxes whose revenue could fund social dividends.
One could argue these are beyond the scope of a budget, but if our economic future is one where the circulation of income through wages falters (because automation decouples productivity from jobs), a forward-looking budget would lay groundwork for alternative circulation mechanisms. That might include public equity stakes in AI enterprises, expanded social security funded by wealth taxes, or at least robust antitrust to prevent winner-take-all tech markets. Instead, what we got was largely a continuation of business-friendly tech policy (EMI share option schemes extended for larger startups, R&D tax tweaks, and the aforementioned AI funds) but no new social contract for the AI era.
In sum, the budget’s approach to AI, automation, and the new economy is incremental and focused on the supply side (training, startups) with little on the demand side (ensuring people have income and access in an automated future). It praises “innovators” but not democratisers. And that is a gap. Engineered capitalism, as I see it, would require universal access to the fruits of AI – perhaps making advanced AI as public as libraries, so that a broad base of people can create, innovate, or simply live decently even if traditional jobs wane. Nothing remotely like that vision appears here. Thus, while the budget is competent in addressing immediate issues, it misses the bigger picture of systemic redesign required by the twin forces of automation and financialisation. It patches the symptoms (a tax tweak, a skills program) but doesn’t yet rewrite the rules of the game.
Conclusion: A Half-Engineered Economy
Taken as a whole, the Autumn Budget 2025 feels like one hand sketching the blueprint of “engineered capitalism” while the other hand erases it. There are bold strokes: child poverty tackled through benefits, wealth being taxed a bit more, small businesses and ordinary people getting support with services. These reflect a recognition that capitalism’s current course of high inequality, weak public infrastructure and stagnant real incomes is not sustainable. In those areas, Reeves’s budget is a breath of fresh air, breaking with years of trickle-down orthodoxy and making policy to actually redistribute and invest. If this were 2010 or 2015, it would be almost unthinkable to see a UK Chancellor proudly raise the tax burden to a post-WWII high to fund welfare and public goods. The fact it’s happening now shows how far the conversation has shifted. It suggests the era of blind faith in markets is waning, and a more hands-on, justice-oriented approach is emerging. In that sense, the Budget inches us toward an engineered capitalism, an economy designed for broad well-being, not just GDP.
And yet, the budget is still anchored to the old paradigm in crucial ways. It prizes GDP growth and fiscal targets as if unaware that we’re in a new epoch of secular stagnation and climate crisis. It soothes markets and wealthy interests even as it attempts to tax them, careful not to scare the horses. It doesn’t fully commit to the level of transformation that our era demands – be it decarbonising at warp speed or redefining work and income in the AI age. There’s a sense of half-measures and hedged bets. The government is willing to tweak capitalism’s dials (tax rates, benefits) but not rewire its circuitry (ownership, power, purpose).
To be fair, rewriting the system overnight was never on the cards. Revolutions in political economy come in steps, not giant leaps, as I wrote about when examining how quickly we could engineer capitalism for the modern age. What we see in this budget might be the first steps: the acknowledgement of problems that were once taboo to mention (like the unfair tax treatment of wealth vs work, or the cruelty of punishing larger families in poverty). For that, this government deserves credit. But the real test will be whether these steps are followed by more fundamental changes. Will we see, in coming years, the development of new metrics beyond GDP to guide policy? Metrics that account for inequality, health, and sustainability? Will there be a move toward genuinely limiting extreme accumulation, perhaps through progressive wealth taxes or legal caps, as an “engineered” system might impose to prevent capitalism’s self-destruction? Will the state ensure that AI and automation become tools of universal empowerment, not just profit engines for a few, before it’s too late?
Those questions remain unanswered. As a result, the budget lands as a thoughtful tweak of late-stage capitalism’s failings, but not a manifesto to transcend them. It has moments of sharpness (especially on tax fairness) yet avoids cliché outrage; indeed Reeves’s tone was one of pragmatic balance. In that, it mirrors this assessment: hopeful but cautious. The budget is trying to reconcile two paradigms – the late-capitalist status quo and a new equitable order – and it hasn’t fully chosen sides. Perhaps that is inevitable in democratic politics; perhaps more radical changes must wait for proof of concept. In the meantime, we must recognise both the progress made and the work ahead.
Engineered capitalism, as I envision it, is not built in a single budget. But each budget can move us closer. Autumn 2025 moved us an inch in the right direction, and it uplifted many who are struggling, but it also clung to the familiar comforts of growth and deference to capital. The engine of the economy is being tinkered with, not yet overhauled. Whether that tinkering will suffice, or whether the engine needs a complete redesign as I have argued, will become apparent in the years to come. For now, this budget leaves us with a paradox: it is at once the most redistributive UK budget in recent memory and still not transformative enough to escape capitalism’s late-stage trajectory.
In true Substack fashion, I’ll end on a reflective note: sometimes systems decline slowly until a pivot comes. The budget hints at a pivot. It’s a faint sketch of a fairer future, but the bold lines have yet to be drawn.