Chancellor Rachel Reeves stood accused of losing control of the economy today as she desperately cut spending further despite record tax rises to cover a £14 billion black hole largely of her own making. The Mail has more.
Rachel Reeves laid out a fresh wave of spending cuts to offset stalling growth today as she battles to balance the Government’s books.
The Chancellor stressed the grim realities facing the country as she delivered her Spring Statement to the Commons, arguing the “world has changed”.
She said she was “proud” of her track record despite having a £14 billion black hole in the finances to fill, after her huge tax-and-spend Autumn Budget was followed by an economic slowdown.
However, she admitted the OBR watchdog has slashed growth forecasts in half, to just 1% this year. It expects inflation to average 3.2% this year, instead of the 2.5% it anticipated in October, and progress on productivity will be lower.
The tax burden is still on track to hit a record high of 37.7% of GDP in 2027-28, from 35.3% this year, with frozen thresholds inflicting more pain on Brits.
The unemployment rate is seen as peaking at 4.5% this year, 160,000 higher than predicted before. After growing by 1.4% in 2025, real earnings are set to stagnate in 2026 and 2027, before struggling to a 0.5% improvement in 2029.
Worryingly, the OBR cautioned that even that sluggish performance could easily be derailed by Donald Trump’s trade war or failure to secure productivity advances in the public sector. And the respected IFS think-tank said the plans were so tight that more tax rises would potentially be needed in the Autumn.
The stormy picture had put Ms Reeves on track to break her own ‘fiscal rules’ before she scrambled to make up the shortfall – saying it would be from spending cuts instead of even more tax rises at this stage.
Meanwhile, Ms Reeves confirmed she had suffered another major setback with the OBR rejecting the previously-claimed £5 billion of savings from benefits reforms.
Instead they have been valued at more like £3 billion – sparking a frantic last-ditch effort to find more cuts despite mounting fury from Labour MPs. Another £400 million is apparently being trimmed from welfare, taking the final expected savings to £3.4 billion.
The bungled process triggered an extraordinary blame game, with claims late tweaks meant the proposals were not given to the OBR in time before they were laid out to the Commons by Liz Kendall last week. …
More than half of voters think Labour is spending too much time blaming the Tories. Some 31% now blame Labour for Britain’s growth crisis, compared with 27% blaming the Conservatives and 18% citing global events.
Worth reading in full.
Let’s not forget that the economy was ‘going gangbusters’ with the fastest growth rate in the G7 when the Tories left power and that the much-vaunted ‘£22 billion black hole’ in the public finances was clarified by the OBR to be just £9.5 billion – smaller than the black hole Reeves has basically made for herself with her own economically illiterate interventions.
Perhaps Rachel from Accounts would be better suited to the complaints department than running a major economy?
Stop Press: Andrew Griffiths has spotted an “unexploded bombshell” in today’s OBR report: “The 300 pages of job-destroying Employment Rights Bill has NOT been reflected in today’s forecasts.”
— Andrew Griffith MP (@griffitha) March 26, 2025
This is the unexploded bomb shell from todays OBR.
The 300 pages of job destroying Employment Rights Bill has NOT been reflected in today’s forecasts.
When that is – and bear in mind not a single employer supports that Bill – it can only mean further downgrades.pic.twitter.com/OfBIdDgz4W
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The Sirius Cybernetics Corporation Complaints Department is the only part of the company to still turn a profit…
£14 BILLION BLACK HOLE despite massive budget cuts, and yet she refuses to mention The Elephant in the Room:
“The Foreign Office statistics reveal £4.3 BILLION OF ITS FOREIGN AID BUDGET went on supporting REFUGEES & ASYLUM SEEKERS IN THE UK.”
Rachel Reeves announces £4.8bn in welfare cuts by DWP
Meanwhile…
Trump Admin Ends Taxpayer-Funded Housing For Illegal Immigrants
Nor the economic devastation from the Rona plandemic.
Nor the unending money laundering/investment in the failed NATO war in the Uketopia.
Nor the unending streams of money to foreign aid and NGOs.
Nor the destruction from Net zero and deindustrialisation.
Nor the millstone that is the £200 billion black hole called the National Death Service….
etc
I really really hate all of these people.
Trump is not supporting or delivering UN Agenda 2030. This little UN propaganda film explains in language an 8 yr old could understand why we are being flooded with low-skilled, low-wage economic migrants and are paying a small fortune to accommodate “refugees.”
https://migrationnetwork.un.org/videos/migration-and-2030-agenda
You can’t lose what you never had.
Also, does anyone ever “have control” of an economy? I know socialists love to think they do, but… You can certainly do your best to wreck one – just ask successive governments since (pick a date of your choosing in the 20th century).
You’re right. No-one can “control” the economy, not even the Chancellor. Influence it, yes, but in an ideal world, the treasury should be there to serve the nation when public finance is required, or at least at beneficial costs compared with the alternative.
They like to make us believe they can control it, when things are going well, and blame factors beyond their control when things go less well.
Tax rises in the pipeline…
This shower of sh1te will NEVER, NEVER, stop pouring money into
untraceable offshore accountsUkraine or housing single young men from countries where they are not under persecution.They will blame Brexit.
Still waiting for former BoE Guv and globalist carnival barker, that idiot Carney (with his ‘trans daughter’) and his predictions that due to Brexit the entire UK banking industry would leave and millions of jobs would be lost. The opposite happened.
Under Starmtard and Reevestard, with a solid from Millipede, Carntard’s prediction might come true. But as usual they will blame Brexit or The Tronald.
Simples, Kommissar Theeves – The £14 billion black hole can be filled with £8 billion to spare by cancelling the Kommissar for Energy Insecurity’s plans to sluice away £22 billion on carbon crapture.
Do us all a favour while you’re at it, and get Kommissar Sir Two-Tier to pack Kommissar Miliband Minor off to the UN as Big Brother’s tea boy until further notice.
Two dirty jobs done in one. Nothing to this politics lark.
The Kommissars Must Fall.
Absolutely.
Scrap net zero, stop send kit we haven’t got and can’t afford to Ukraine and stop all spending on asylum seekers, and basically that’s job done.
It took me 5 minutes to write that – wtf has Rachel from accounts been doing for the last 8 months?
Stupid cow.
We only need to bring the Assisted Dying Bill in for a short while……. How many members of the Cabinet are there?
Time to dust off those “Labour isn’t working” posters.
And yet Rachel from Accounts had the nerve to claim we would be £500 better off by the end of this parliament. As mythical as the £300 cheaper energy bills as a £500 increase in costs is more likely.
So growth at ~1%, but inflation at 3.2%… so in cash terms, doesn’t that leave us ~2% year on year worse off? And that’s before you take into account the lack of inflation increases in tax brackets etc, another stealth tax
https://open.substack.com/pub/newsfromuncibal/p/if-you-want-to-make-god-laugh-show?r=ylgqf&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email
Recommend reading this.
Why does anyone, for or agin the government, put any stock in what the OBR says? Their predictions are about as accurate as Professor Pantsdown’s COVID nonsense.
If the economy needs to be crashed to get shot of this bunch of felons, so be it.
Just a heads up that it was Andrew Griffith (no s) who discovered the “unexploded bomb”, not Andrew Griffiths. The latter is an ex-MP.
To lose control of something requires that you had control in the first place.
It’s the 1970s again… Marxist Socialist Labour policies.
“Socialists don’t understand economics. If they did, they wouldn’t be Socialists.” Prof Thomas Sowell.
But cutting the blood supply to the parasites – of this I approve. Shutting down the welfare state is the only way to stop the economic and social rot.
UK debt = £2.6 trillion. That’s the aggregate cost of the parasitic, welfare state and the true tax liability of everyone in the population.
Say what you will about our Rach, the one thing I (sort of) admire is her talent for being absolutely rubbish at her job but still appearing confident in her own abillity. That takes some doing.
Pretty common skill amongst the modern political class…