Rachel Reeves framed her Spring Statement around the insistence that Labour’s Plan for Change was already working, which meant that any changes she was having to make today had to be framed as small ‘adjustments’, rather than the sort of change of course that would allow the Conservatives to claim she was delivering an ‘emergency budget’.
She insisted that she was sticking to only one fiscal event a year, but the Chancellor did have to make a number of admissions in today’s speech, chief among them that the OBR had cut its growth forecast for the year from 2 per cent to 1 per cent. She said she was ‘not satisfied with these numbers’, and that the government was ‘serious about taking the action needed to grow our economy, backing the builders, not the blockers’. So any good news is a sign the Labour plan is working, and any bad news is the fault of the blockers and the Tories.
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