British politicians rarely lie. Even Boris Johnson’s notorious claim on the red Brexit bus in 2016 that Britain sends £350 million a week to the European Union was not actually a lie. That was the official level of Britain’s contribution to the Brussels budget. What the advert didn’t say was that around half comes back in the form of rebates and investment subsidies.
So this week, when the Tory leader Kemi Badenoch and most of the UK media accused Chancellor Rachel Reeves of “lying” about the state of the UK’s deficit in order to justify tax rises, I did not add my voice to the clamour. In fact, she had done something almost as bad. She used sleight of hand to push through yet another increase in Britain’s already unsustainable welfare bill.
Reeves was doing what all politicians do, which is being economical with the truth. When she delivered her dire warnings about the “black hole” in public finances in an alarmist early morning address to UK voters just weeks before budget day, she did not inform them that the independent budgetary watchdog, the Office for Budget Responsibility, had radically downgraded its expectations of the gap.
She did not, in fact, have to increase taxes by £26 billion in order to reassure the bond markets that the UK finances were sound. The notional deficit had actually turned into a nominal surplus of about £4 billion as a result of better-than-expected tax returns.
But Reeves kept talking about black holes to divert attention from what was in fact “a Budget for Benefits Street,” as Badenoch put it—a reckless gamble with the nation’s future.
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