Wealth & Money Quote by John Redwood

Redwood’s line is less a budget note than a mood-engine: it takes the sprawling abstraction of public spending and shrinks it to the pinch point of a payslip. “They are always after your money” is accusatory in the way good opposition rhetoric often is - it casts the state as a persistent pickpocket and the voter as a target, not a citizen-investor. The grammar helps. “They” is deliberately vague (Labour, bureaucrats, the whole spending class), while “your” is intimate and proprietary. He isn’t arguing about policy outcomes; he’s arguing about ownership and consent.

The phrase “around average earnings” is the quiet weapon here. It frames the imagined listener as mainstream and squeezed, someone without “spare capacity” - a term that borrows the cool tone of economics to validate a hot feeling: resentment. It’s a way of saying austerity isn’t ideology, it’s household necessity. That’s the subtext: you can’t be expected to fund national ambition when your own margins are thin.

Then comes “follies,” a word doing a lot of moral work. It doesn’t just mean wasteful; it implies childishness, vanity projects, the kind of spending that exists for political theater rather than public need. By saying Labour “keep spending their money on,” Redwood lands the punch: it’s not “our” money spent on “our” priorities, it’s “your” money spent on “their” indulgences. The context is classic British fiscal combat - a battle over whether government is a provider or a taker - but the intent is sharper: convert economic anxiety into a simple, repeatable suspicion.