
Reeves needs to tell the public that they’re wrong
Writing about Britain’s spending plans has started to feel a bit like swimming through treacle. It’s not that there aren’t lots of interesting observations to make about Wednesday’s £300 billion spending announcement. Such as the fact that the NHS sucks up the bulk of the resource spending with a 3 per cent rise in real terms, while every other department combined only grows by 0.2 per cent. Or that the health service will soon take up nearly half of all day-to-day government spending on services. Or that only 13 per cent of Rachel Reeves’s capital spending increase is classed as ‘growth-focused’. It’s hard to pay attention to this because of the sense