Does Rachel Reeves have to hike taxes?

Could Rachel Reeves’s ‘black hole’ be filled not through tax rises or even spending cuts but rather through getting an extra two million people into work? That is the claim this morning made by the Jobs Foundation, a think tank set up by Matthew Elliott, now Lord Elliott, who formerly ran the Taxpayers’ Alliance. Raising the employment rate from 75 per cent to 80 per cent of the working age population, it claims, would raise an extra £20 billion in tax. That is not quite the £35 billion to £40 billion worth of tax rises which we have been briefed to expect in Wednesday’s Budget, but never mind – all those extra jobs would be a huge contribution to the public purse.

How do you create those jobs and, equally importantly, persuade British people to fill them? It isn’t that UK employers are failing to create jobs; they are. But there is a very large and growing contingent of the UK adult population which it seems would prefer not to take up employment, preferring to get by on welfare instead.