After a lead up mired in chaos and leaks, the UK’s new budget dropped last week. At first glance it is substantially less terrible than I had feared.

Not everyone agrees of course, because not everyone agrees on anything any more. Yougov did some interesting polling on the public reaction to its individual components , shown below.

Auto-generated description: Survey results show British public opinions on various 2025 Budget policies, with majority support for increased gambling taxes and freezing rail fares, but less support for universal free childcare and tax policy adjustments.

Probably the one I’m most confused / despondent about is the negative public reaction to the eradicating of the 2 child benefit limit.

A majority of Britons though this was a bad move. But how anyone could imagine this was the wrong thing to do given it was a policy that condemned hundreds of thousand of children to poverty whilst seemingly failing to achieve its self-declared aims whatsoever is beyond me.

Innocent children should not be punished no matter how poorly you believe their parents have behaved.