Rachel Reeves’s porkies will have dire costs for us all

Has Rachel Reeves been economical with the truth? The UK chancellor stands accused of painting a misleadingly bleak picture of Britain’s public finances in order to justify the whopping £26 billion in tax hikes in her autumn budget. For weeks, the Treasury had been leaking about a multibillion-pound ‘black hole’. Reeves even delivered an unprecedented pre-budget speech on the steps of Downing Street, over a fortnight before the autumn statement. All with the aim of softening the blow for the kind of tax raid she had so explicitly ruled out in her first tax-hiking budget last year.

Then came the bombshell. On Friday, Richard Hughes, the (since deposed) head of the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), informed parliament’s Treasury Select Committee that the OBR projections for tax receipts were much higher than Reeves had publicly let on. So much so, in fact, that far from confronting a £30 billion ‘black hole’, the chancellor actually had a surplus of £4.2 billion to play with – that is, over what she’d be required to raise to meet her self-imposed ‘fiscal rules’. What’s more, she had been informed of this figure weeks before her gloomy Downing Street address. As Sky News’ Ed Conway spells out, this means that Reeves’s tax rises were not necessary to meet her fiscal rules but were a ‘choice’. If her ‘choice’ was to give herself more fiscal headroom and keep borrowing in check, then perhaps it would have been a sensible move. More likely, and less forgivable, is that this was a ‘choice’ to allow welfare spending to balloon, including by lifting the two-child benefit cap.

None of this is to suggest that the UK’s public finances were not in dire straits, even if Reeves misled us about the scale of the problem. What this episode has really exposed is Reeves’s and the Labour Party’s true priorities. In their eyes, even in an era of strained public finances, welfare spending must rise at all costs. And if taxes need to be hiked to record levels to fund this, then so be it. If lies need to be told to justify those tax rises, then that’s apparently fine, too.

After all, welfarism is the glue that binds the modern Labour Party together. Never mind that one in 10 of Britain’s working-age population is now on some sort of disability benefit, with claims – especially for mental-health conditions – surging fastest among the young. Apparently, discouraging millions of Britons from taking up productive employment is now a core ‘Labour value’. Simply handing out welfare cheques, it seems, is enough to warm the cockles of the whole Labour family, from the prime minister and his chancellor to the soft-left backbenchers.

As to whether the chancellor misled the public, it’s not as if she doesn’t have form here. This is the same Rachel Reeves who claimed to be an economist at HBOS in the 2000s, when she actually ran a customer-complaints department – earning her that notorious nickname, Rachel from Accounts. It’s the same Rachel Reeves who claimed to be a British under-14s ‘chess champion’, when she actually came 26th. It’s the same Rachel Reeves whose book, The Women Who Made Modern Economics, contained more than 20 instances of plagiarism, with passages lifted wholesale, in some cases, from other sources. Nevertheless, Keir Starmer tried to assure us yesterday that Reeves did not mislead the public and that he was ‘proud’ of her supposedly progressive budget.

I can’t be alone in noticing an irony in Labour’s willingness to close ranks around Reeves and her porkies. After all, not so long ago, Labour and its media outriders were constantly clutching their pearls about the alleged lies of Boris Johnson. The former PM, we were endlessly told, was a man who ‘lies and lies and lies’, and ‘knows a hundred different ways to lie’. According to one book-length account of Johnson’s fibs: ‘Standards of truth-telling… collapsed at the precise moment Boris Johnson and his associates entered 10 Downing Street in the early afternoon of 24 July 2019.’ Apparently, his occasionally misleading statements, his spinning of statistics, amounted to a fully fledged ‘assault on truth’ itself.

If Boris Johnson really did invent lying, as Labour’s backers insist, then Rachel Reeves has surely turned it into an art form, with far graver consequences for the nation. Her creative accounting will end up costing us all dearly.

Fraser Myers is deputy editor at spiked and host of the spiked podcast. Follow him on X: @FraserMyers.