Not sure if I'm the Paul in question

but anyway - as it happens, I read it, and yes, it's full of zingers - absolutely cracking last para ....

Then again, the chancellor does love a simplistic way of putting things – black holes, fixing house foundations – so here’s one for her. Why does she seem to be catching up only now with things many people told her before the last election? Why is the long-term state of the British economy a surprise only to Reeves and to the cadre of full-time dreamers who believed Starmer’s Labour were “the grownups”? As so many made clear before the general election, Labour’s promises on tax and blandishments about growth were totally unrealistic and un-thought-through. In fact, they were such obvious obfuscations or deliberate misdirections that for my money they amounted to lying. Can it genuinely be that the chancellor didn’t catch herself on to the glaring realities of “the books” – which are effectively always open, as the IFS pointed out at the time? No, it can’t. As she put it about the details of the public finances during the run-up to last year’s election: “We’ve got the Office for Budget Responsibility now … You don’t need to win an election to find out.” Halloween might have passed, but huge numbers of these quotes are going to haunt Reeves for the foreseeable future.

Posted By: paulg on November 5th 2025 at 13:56:49

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