Reeves’s Spring Statement just doesn’t add up

Is Rachel Reeves toast? Not according to her. The Chancellor delivered an aggressively self-confident statement about Labour’s spending plans this afternoon. Soberly dressed in maroon, she rattled through her speech like a garden shredder grinding up branches and reducing them to pale little woodchips. Anyone would think she was pondering a leadership bid. After listing her achievements since last July, she issued a warning to the doubters. 

‘I will return in the autumn to deliver the Budget.’ 

She relied on a good deal of amateur magicianship to conceal her fibs and exaggerations. Last autumn she claimed that £6.5 billion could be raised by cracking down on tax evasion. But that’s only the start. The duckers and divers have multiplied vastly in recent months, it seems. She has now ordered HMRC to find 20 per cent more of these crooks whose unpaid tax bills will be worth £1 billion to the Treasury. ‘These figures have been verified by the OBR,’ she said.