The spending review will be mostly about making explicit bad news that has not yet been spelt out. The total for planned public spending over the next three years has already been set: what Rachel Reeves will announce in the House of Commons on Wednesday is how much has been allocated to each department.
Hence the distraction of announcing capital spending projects around the country, as Reeves did on her trip to Rochdale this week. Perhaps she was hoping that the short attention spans of journalists meant that they had forgotten she changed her fiscal rules in the Budget in October to allow more capital investment. That was when she sensibly excluded investment that will earn a return from the annual limit on how much the government can borrow.
