PHILIP HAMMOND’S first Budget was, by everyone’s judgement, a catastrophic failure. It has failed to deal with the crisis in our NHS and social care — with no money to deal with the crisis facing hospitals.

It has failed to deal with the living standards crisis — leaving six million people earning less than the living wage.

And it has failed women — as 86 per cent of the savings to the Treasury come out of the pockets of women.

All of that should have been enough to make for some fairly damaging headlines, but on top of that the Chancellor has hammered the self-employed with a shock £2 billion national insurance tax hike, breaking the Tories’ own manifesto promise.

This broken promise will hit self-employed low and middle-earners the hardest, with plumbers, hairdressers and builders bearing the brunt of this budget — even as £70bn is cut from taxes to corporations and the super-rich.

Usually the iron law of Budgets is “the louder the cheers for the Chancellor on Budget day, the greater the disappointment three days later at the weekend.”

The iron law needs revising — this Budget did not last three days; it lasted less than three hours.

How can anyone describe an economy as “match fit,” as the Chancellor has done, when people are seeing their standard of living fall and fall again?

Wages are still worth less than they were nine years ago. The disposable incomes of non-retired households are less than they were before the financial crisis.

Delivering his post-Budget verdict, Institute for Fiscal Studies director Paul Johnson couldn’t have put it more accurately: “On current forecasts, average earnings will be no higher in 2022 than they were in 2007. Fifteen years without a pay rise — I’m rather lost for superlatives. This is completely unprecedented.”

The Chancellor tried to claim in one press release that we have an economy built on resilience. To be frank, we have an economy built on sand.

Business investment fell over the past year for the first time since the depths of the last recession.

Companies are cancelling planned investments because they are terrified of what the future holds under this government.

They have seen seven wasted years pass without the investment or industrial strategy that they need from the government, and they are now fearful of the government’s plans for Brexit. Productivity growth — the engine of prosperity — has stagnated, and we now lag far behind similar economies.

On top of this, the crisis in our public services is reaching unprecedented levels.

According to the King’s Fund, social care needs £2bn now just to cope with the emergency. The money the Chancellor announced amounts to less than a third of what is needed.

Ahead of the Autumn Statement last November, Labour and others were warning that the NHS was in crisis.

It was in crisis before the winter, but the Chancellor could not find a single penny for the NHS in the Autumn Statement.

The Royal College of Nursing now says that the NHS is in its worst crisis ever. I find it astonishing that there was a complete failure on the part of the Chancellor in the Budget to recognise the scale of the crisis that our hospitals and doctors face.

Let’s remember — it is a crisis that the government created itself.

The Chancellor is however providing £1bn for the vanity project of free schools. That is more money for the ludicrous throwback of grammar schools.

Thousands of Whitehall hours have been wasted on schemes for a tiny handful of privileged children, leaving the rest to fail.

The Chancellor dared to talk about the difficult decisions he has had to make. But it is not he who is making the difficult decisions — he is passing the buck on to others for his cuts.?

The Chancellor lives in a world in which he is completely insulated from the consequences of his decisions. He can sit in No 11 Downing Street and delete lines from his spreadsheet without a thought for the consequences. For him, it is all in a day’s work, and it is the rest of our society who must deal with the results.

We have had seven long years of austerity from this Conservative government, and the spending cuts have dragged our economy and society to the brink.

We need a government that will introduce a fair taxation system, who will use public resources for long-term, patient investment in our economy, that will tackle tax evasion and avoidance at the same time, and that will grow our economy but, as we build a prosperous economy, will ensure that that prosperity is shared by all rather than being given away in tax cuts for the rich and the corporations.

Last week’s Budget was not just complacent; it was arrogant, and it was cruel. Labour will oppose this Budget and continue to fight for a fairer society.

We will fight to win the funding our NHS and social care services needed, and we’ll oppose the Tories’ vanity project grammar schools plans. But more than this, we are fighting for a Labour government that will transform our economy for the benefit of working people.

John McDonnell is shadow chancellor of the exchequer.