Rachel Reeves’s ‘stability Budget’ contained few surprises

All the political framing of the past three months has been around Rachel Reeves’ first Budget. Black holes have been ‘discovered’, public services have been found to be in a worse state than expected, and Liz Truss has been exhumed at every opportunity (or at least, when she hasn’t been inserting herself into the political narrative).

Today’s speech from Rachel Reeves contained quite a few attempts to deal with the failures of that framing, too. She repeatedly insisted that she was keeping the promises in Labour’s election manifesto, after weeks of confusion about what ‘working people’ are. She also repeated her party conference phrase that her optimism for Britain ‘burns brighter than ever’, after accusations that she had been far too gloomy in her first few months in office. And she paid particular attention to spending announcements that she said would combat child poverty after early rows on the two child benefit limit.

Reeves told the Commons that she had taken the choice to ‘grow our economy’, as though the Conservatives had taken the deliberate path of shrinking it.