In his “emergency budget” of 2010, delivered a month after that year’s general election, the newly appointed chancellor, George Osborne, set out the rationale for an age of austerity that would frame British politics for the next decade. Falsely associating the devastating impact of the global economic crash with Labour spending and borrowing policies, Mr Osborne exploited a crisis to launch a disastrous crusade to shrink the size of the state.
On Monday afternoon, in another defining Commons moment, Rachel Reeves also turned on her immediate predecessors, but with more legitimate arguments at her disposal. In a withering analysis, Ms Reeves laid out a “£22bn hole” of unfunded commitments for this year, much of it discovered only on opening up the books in office. The outgoing government, which calculated that an election defeat was assured, had made no attempt to make its own sums add up.
