Rachel Reeves has no one to blame for the impending tax rises but herself, writes Mel Stride

The Labour Chancellor talked for nearly an hour and managed to blame everyone but herself for the mess she has made of Britain’s finances.

But the truth is simple: this was an emergency speech from a Chancellor panicking about the speculation she herself has fuelled. After months of confusion and mixed signals, all Reeves has done is confirm what households and businesses already feared - that tax rises are coming.

Reeves is doing her best to dress it up as “fairness” and “difficult choices”, but the reality is clear. Before Reeves took office, she promised no new tax rises. Within months, she delivered a £40 billion raid on working people and business - the biggest single tax rise in more than 30 years.

She then said she’d wiped the slate clean; she wasn’t coming back for more. Just a year later, she’s rolling the pitch for more tax rises.

Let me be clear. If Rachel Reeves breaks her promise and raises taxes yet again, enough is enough. She must go.

Her excuses are as familiar as they are tired. When the numbers don’t add up, Reeves blames someone else. But this is about choices. And time after time, she makes the wrong ones.

She’s allowed public spending to spiral, failed to reform a welfare system crying out for change - scrapping the reforms I was working on as Work and Pensions Secretary - and loaded the bill onto hardworking families already struggling with higher prices and mortgage costs.

Under Rachel Reeves, inflation has almost doubled, debt has ballooned, spending is up, interest rates are staying higher for longer, borrowing costs hit a 27-year high, and business confidence is at a record low.

Her reckless ‘Jobs Tax’ alone has already cost more than 160,000 jobs. Many of them in hospitality, retail and small business - the very sectors we need to drive growth.

Now she’s turning her sights on Britain’s savers - considering cuts to Cash ISA allowances that would punish people for doing the right thing, putting money aside and planning for their futures. Once again, when the sums don’t add up, it’s ordinary families who pay the price.

If the Chancellor truly believed she had “fixed the public finances” last year, as she claimed this morning, then she wouldn’t be laying the groundwork for more tax rises today. The truth is, she fiddled with the fiscal rules so she could borrow hundreds of billions more and let debt rise every single year.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. If Rachel Reeves gets a grip on government spending and reforms welfare, she doesn’t need to raise taxes again and break her promises. But this Labour government don’t have the backbone to control spending.

Just last week, they announced that their review of sickness benefits was ruling out saving a single penny from the welfare bill. That is literally planning for failure.

The British people deserve a government that rewards hard work, not one that punishes it. A future Conservative government under Kemi Badenoch has a clear plan: to live within our means, reduce the size of government, back small business, and get Britain working again.

Rachel Reeves will always find someone to blame. But families and businesses know who’s really responsible - and they deserve better than this failing Chancellor.

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Mel Stride MP is Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer.

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