UK unveils emergency budget amid big demands but little cash

LONDON (AP) — So many demands. So little money.

Just three weeks after taking office, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak faces the challenge of balancing the nation's budget while helping millions of people slammed by a cost-of-living crisis as Russia's war in Ukraine pushes up energy prices and slows economic growth.

Treasury chief Jeremy Hunt will deliver the government’s plan for tackling a sputtering economy in a speech to the House of Commons on Thursday.

The emergency budget statement aims to restore the government’s financial and political credibility after former Prime Minister Liz Truss announced 45 billion pounds ($53 billion) in unfunded tax cuts that torpedoed investor confidence, sent the pound to record lows against the U.S. dollar and sparked emergency central bank intervention. Truss was forced to resign six weeks after taking office.

Hunt is expected to announce 30 billion pounds in spending cuts and 24 billion in tax increases, the BBC and other British media reported.

The government will struggle to meet all of the competing demands, said Torsten Bell, chief executive of the Resolution Foundation, a think tank that seeks to improve the living standards of low- and middle-income people.

“The uncomfortable reality is that unless global energy price rises reverse, we will remain poorer as a country than we’d hoped to be,” Bell wrote this week. “The world is as it is, not as we would like it to be, but the question is how well we wrestle with that reality.”

That means grappling with the demands of nurses, police officers, border guards and civil servants who are all clamoring for pay increases after inflation accelerated to a 41-year high of 11.1% in October. Welfare recipients and pensioners also are looking for higher payments, and low-income...