Rachel Reeves was confronted with footage of herself vowing she ‘won’t be back for more’ today as she struggled to justify her latest tax bomb Budget.
The Chancellor had to sit awkwardly on Sky News while her words from the aftermath of the last record-breaking tax package were played out.
In the video from a year ago she was seen saying that the £40billion of increases had ‘wiped the slate clean… it’s now on us’.
‘We don’t need to come back for more,’ she said. ‘There’s no need to come back with another Budget like this.’
Touring broadcast studios this morning to defend the extraordinary new raid on Brits’ wallets, presenter Trevor Phillips said: ‘That wasn’t true, was it?’
A flustered Ms Reeves replied by attempting to blame productivity downgrades by the Treasury’s OBR watchdog for the issues.
That is despite the independent body having revealed that it was telling Ms Reeves months ago that productivity downgrades had been largely wiped out by better-than-expected tax revenues.
By the end of October the OBR was predicting that the government would be running a small surplus, with Labour’s U-turns on winter fuel allowance, benefits reforms and the two-child benefit cap the only things pushing the finances into the red.
Ms Reeves said: ‘Well, the budget this year was not on the scale of the one last year, but as I set out in my speech at the beginning of November, the context for this budget did change and I did have to ask people to contribute more.
‘And the biggest thing that happened between the spring forecast and the forecast that the Office of Budget Responsibility provided for this budget was a big downgrade in productivity.’
Phillips persisted that what Ms Reeves said was ‘literally not true’, suggesting she should be up fron that ‘what you thought you were going to be able to do, turned out not to be the case’.
Ms Reeves again argued that the reasons were ‘not in my control’.
