Will Rachel Reeves’s rules on debt and spending survive the budget?
The chancellor desperately needs more money to finance growth and public spending, so expect some tweaking to supposedly strict constraints. Labour needs £25bn a year in tax rises ‘to rebuild public services’ change.
Later this month the chancellor will attempt to walk the line between repairing Britain’s battered public realm while sticking to a manifesto promise to balance the books without raising taxes on working people. However, as the Institute for Fiscal Studies warns in its pre-budget analysis, this leaves Reeves with the job of financing change within tough constraints of the party’s own making. It’s a challenge that could be tough, it says, if not impossible to unpick without moving the goalposts.
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