What the Budget Missed and Why It Matters
by Richard Kirtley, Nov 28th 2025
This Tuesday’s first Reith Lecture of 2025 by the Dutch Historian Rutger Bregman stood in startling contrast to Wednesday’s budget.
Although the Reith Lecture has received most coverage for the BBC’s censoring of Bregman’s judgment on Donald Trump, far more interesting was his call for a moral revolution – for growth and good in equal measure.
The budget does very little to change the landscape for ordinary people. A little money off energy bills here, a little more on pensions there. A small charge on electric cars, getting rid of the child benefit cap. What it truly lacks is vision, ambition and hope. Perhaps the Chancellor should have spent some time listening to the Reith lecture on Tuesday.
As Bremen said in his lecture, “the purpose of power is to do good… We need a new kind of ambition, not for status, or wealth, or fame, but for integrity, courage, and public service, a moral ambition.”
At Purple Shoots we are realistic that there isn’t an endless supply of government money. So we need both inexpensive solutions and to draw in others who do have resources to take action. How can we engage business leaders with the concept of what Bremen calls the “moral maximum”?
“What we’ve seen the past couple of years and decades is so many movements that have all been about … the bare minimum, maybe recycle our garbage, compensate our CO2 emissions, give a tiny, tiny fractions of our earnings to some kind of philanthropy… Maybe then we’re good people?
No, we’ve really got to up our game. I think business for good, if it really wants to be worth its name, it’s got to be looking for that moral maximum… donating 10% of your earnings to the most important movements of our time. I would love to see much more of that where business leaders aren’t just talking a lot about their relatively unambitious attempts to do a tiny little bit of good, but where they’re really trying to take risks and do so much more because that’s what’s necessary now.”
Doing the moral maximum isn’t about being altruistic. A society with a growing economy and hopeful, engaged citizens is one where every business will flourish. But to get to it, we must be ambitious for all of our citizens. We need to create circumstances in which even the most marginalised can pursue their dreams, whether that is building their own business or making changes in their communities together.
At Purple Shoots we help people to take control of their lives, knowing that you can build a flourishing business or community group, whether you’re on benefits, disabled or a single parent (or even all three!).
Maybe for next year’s budget the Chancellor can look around at examples like Purple Shoots, where we are having real, and cost effective, impact in individuals and communities, and think about how she can draw on us to offer a more positive and hopeful vision of the future.