"Reeves on the brink over tax lies..."

[dutchman]

Chancellor fighting for job after being accused of misleading public over ‘black hole’ she used to justify massive raid on workers



Rachel Reeves misled the public over the state of the country’s finances as she plotted her £30bn tax raid, allegedly to save herself and Sir Keir Starmer.

The Chancellor was at war with the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) on Friday night after the watchdog published a blow-by-blow account of its discussions with the Treasury in the run-up to this week’s shambolic Budget.

It revealed that a series of statements in recent weeks from Ms Reeves and her officials falsely exaggerated the fiscal shortfall she faced, preparing the ground for her to raise taxes and welfare spending.

The futures of both Ms Reeves and Richard Hughes, the OBR chief, were in doubt after the Treasury attacked his decision to open up the “private space” for officials to debate forecasts and the effect of policy changes.

Mr Hughes will give evidence to MPs on the Treasury select committee next week. Ms Reeves will have to face questions about her actions from broadcasters on the Sunday morning television politics shows.

The revelations follow weeks of briefings from Treasury insiders to newspapers, including The Telegraph, that suggested the Government was facing a large shortfall in the public finances, with estimates of the size varying from £20bn to £30bn.

Sources close to Ms Reeves used this alleged hole to justify drawing up plans for a massive tax raid.

However, in a letter to the Treasury committee, Mr Hughes revealed that Ms Reeves had “at no point” faced a shortfall of more than £2.5bn.

Mr Hughes also confirmed that on Oct 31, the OBR had upgraded its forecasts and told Ms Reeves that she in fact had a £4.2bn surplus, even after taking into account a significant downgrade to productivity.

Yet four days later, Ms Reeves held a press conference in Downing Street, at which she made the case for tax rises and suggested that the watchdog’s forecasts were worse than expected.

In a press conference on Nov 4, Ms Reeves strongly suggested that she would be forced to break Labour’s manifesto pledge and raise income tax to help repair Britain’s finances.

She hinted that economic forecasts were challenging and that this had “consequences for the public finances” that she would not “sweep under the carpet”. She added: “I’m being honest with people.”

The following week, it emerged that the Treasury would not be increasing income tax. Sources claimed this was because “the facts had changed” as a result of an upgrade from the OBR.

However, in the OBR’s account, no changed forecast was issued between Ms Reeves’s press conference and the subsequent about-turn.

On Friday night, the Chancellor doubled down on her claims, telling The Guardian that she had to consider breaking the manifesto pledge because the OBR had not informed her of the details of its economic forecasts.

“We did look, as everyone knows, at income tax and National Insurance, that was a responsible thing to do, because we didn’t know the size of the downgrade, the productivity,” she said in an interview, which was given in the hours before the scandal broke.

Mr Hughes claimed that he had told the Chancellor about the productivity downgrade as early as Aug 7 – months before speculation began about an income tax raid – and then it was not changed again.

“We did not revisit that 0.3 percentage point reduction at any subsequent point in the forecast process,” Mr Hughes wrote in an open letter to Dame Meg Hillier, the committee chairman.

He added: “At no point in our pre-measures forecast process were either of the Government’s fiscal targets missed by more than £2.5bn.”

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/11/28/rachel-reeves-accused-of-lying-to-justify-tax-raid/

[rebbonk]

I think we all know that her CV is not exactly very accurate. Had you or I used an 'inaccurate' CV to gain a position, we would be dismissed and possibly face fraud charges.

But, it's OK when they do it!