Rachel Reeves gambled in her Budget in October. The chancellor took many of the right decisions to start to restore the public finances, even if The Independent did not agree with the mix of tax rises that she chose. Too much of the burden fell on employers – and therefore indirectly on their employees – in the form of the rise in national insurance contributions, which will take effect in two weeks’ time.
But her bigger problem was that she was too emphatic. The “ironclad” chancellor suggested that she had taken tough decisions to fix the public finances that she had inherited in such a poor state from a desperate and exhausted Conservative government.
