Westminster has a habit of staging occasions that are at once both lacklustre and ridiculous, and last Tuesday saw yet another one. Rachel Reeves’s speech, we were told, was an act of “pitch-rolling”, performed because – in the words of Treasury sources – the chancellor and her colleagues were “desperate” to get her message across to the public. Here, unfortunately, was the essence of the event’s absurdity: as if to confirm people’s most cynical views of politics, she served notice that she is about to do something hugely significant, but refused to explicitly say what it is.
But thanks to nods, winks and the usual anonymous briefings, what she was signalling was obvious: she could no longer honour her party’s manifesto pledge not to raise national insurance, VAT or income tax – and that, in a gambit last tried by a chancellor in 1975, the basic rate of the last is likely to go up.
