There are just sixteen days to go until the Budget – and the pitch is being well and truly rolled. Having conducted her ‘I can’t talk about that’ press conference last week, the Chancellor has now done an interview with 5Live to drop a few more hints about the truly Awful Statement she is planning in a fortnight’s time. That sound you can hear is the rich and mobile fleeing this country…
The big question about her second Budget is whether Reeves intends to break her 16-month-old pledge not to raise income tax, VAT or National Insurance. The answer, increasingly, appears to be ‘yes’, with the Chancellor informing the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) on Friday that a rise in personal taxation is one of the ‘major measures’ that she will announce later this month.
Today, she went further, telling the BBC’s Matt Chorley that:
It would of course be possible to stick to the manifesto commitments but that would require things like deep cuts in capital spending and the reason our productivity and growth has been so poor in recent years is because governments have always taken the easy option.
She went on to suggest that she would scrap the two-child benefit cap entirely, saying ‘we will take action on child poverty. The last Labour government proudly reduced child poverty, and we will reduce child poverty as well.’ With such a move expected to cost £3bn, expect to see the income tax pledge go up in smoke shortly…
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