ALEX BRUMMER: 'Wise old hen' Chancellor dances on a pinhead

Daily Mail​

06-06-2025

Rachel Reeves's pledge to restore fiscal stability and confine herself to one budgetary event a year is threadbare. When she delivers Labour's first full spending review next Wednesday, it will be her fourth visit to the dispatch box.
As the Economist magazine remarked this week, it has been 'all pain, no gain'.
Most of her difficulties can be traced back to the alleged discovery of a £22billion black hole in her public spending audit on July 30 last year.
Reeves established a narrative, repeated by rote by her Cabinet colleagues, about a terrible inheritance.
The number was contrived, in that the biggest element was a giveaway to public sector unions and railway workers, which brought a temporary truce.
The Chancellor has made a series of tactical and strategic mistakes. At that very first appearance at the Treasury, she sowed the seeds of festering political dissonance by withdrawing the winter fuel allowance from pensioners. A costed gain to the Exchequer of £1.4billion last year and £1.5billion this year has proved ferociously politically expensive. It is now to be partly reversed in the spending review with the fuel payments restored but taxed as income for better-off silver surfers.
Reeves then created a new rod for her back in her first Budget in October. The impact of £40billion of tax increases, fuelled by the debilitating rise in National Insurance Contributions, caused a growth stammer. The fundamental error was in shaping the fiscal rules. Taxation and current spending would be broadly balanced. The Government would only borrow for investment.
But by leaving herself so little room for error on current spending, £10bn of headroom, the Chancellor sprung a trap. She ignored Harold Macmillan's dictum, 'Events, dear boy, events.' The headroom detonated another booby trap. Reeves's third intervention came in the spring.
She took the axe to welfare, most notoriously to personal independence payments (PIPs) for those claiming disability benefits. It started a debate about Labour values, which has exposed Reeves to pressure to restore £3.5billion of payments to families with more than two children.
Which brings us to the spending review. Any hopes that this would be the moment for Reeves to repair struggling public services have been smashed.
A downgrade to the Office for Budget Responsibility's growth forecast, surging defence spending, the U-turn on winter fuel and the rocketing cost of servicing the national debt mean the envelope for current spending is negligible, with overall increases confined to 1.2 per cent or so.
The joy, such as it is, will come from the capital spending plans. We had a flavour of this earlier in the week when Reeves unsheathed £15billion of transport investment across the North. One cannot but think most of these are reheated plans already announced by her predecessors.
Infrastructure is critical and the Elizabeth Line in London and HS2 activity around Birmingham provide graphic evidence of how bold schemes can generate growth. But axing a supercomputer project in Edinburgh, as the Chancellor did last July, hardly speaks to UK tech ambition.
In conversation at the CBI this week, Reeves described herself as a 'wise old hen' among G7 finance ministers as elections have brought newbies to the table.
Her fiscal fortitude is creditable. Further tax increases, having pledged not to come back for more, would be a deception too far.