Mel Stride: Reeves is a ‘broken promises Chancellor’ who is about to make a bad situation worse

Sir Mel Stride is the shadow Chancellor.

.Today, Rachel Reeves will raise your taxes not because she has to but because she wants to. Because Labour needs another tax raid to bankroll an explosion in welfare spending. Not to steady the ship or reassure the markets, as Reeves would have you believe, but to placate the Labour left who now have her – and Keir Starmer – over a barrel.

The Chancellor has spent weeks insisting that her hands are tied. That she is boxed in by global forces, by Brexit, by the pandemic, or by the legacy we Conservatives left behind. But the truth is both simpler and far more troubling.

Labour have blown a colossal black hole in the public finances with their economic mismanagement and their chaotic U-turns. This is the result of their poor decisions, their inability to control spending and their failure to grasp the basics of how the economy works. More taxes, more borrowing and more spending was only every going to go one way. Lower growth, higher unemployment, higher inflation and borrowing costs at their highest in a generation.

And yet Reeves looks set to simply give us more of the same, repeating all the same mistakes instead of recognising her errors. Yet more tax rises to fund yet more welfare spending. Britain simply cannot afford Labour’s welfare splurge – and hard-working families should not be expected to pay for it.

We all know the country is in the midst of a cost-of-living squeeze. Families are making sacrifices every day, planning carefully, cutting back where they can, and keeping their heads above water by tightening their belts. In times like these, the very least politicians owe the public is honesty. What they do not need is more reckless promises and open-ended commitments to spending billions that the country does not have. We must live within our means.

If Reeves scraps the two-child benefit cap, that single policy is set to add £3.5 billion to the benefits bill. Unbelievably, every party except the Conservatives now backs scrapping the cap: Labour, the Lib Dems, Reform, the Greens, the SNP – all rushing to sign up to an unsustainable welfare giveaway. Only the Conservatives are making the responsible argument which the majority of ordinary voters agree with the cap must stay. And if Labour scraps it, a future Conservative government will reinstate it.

The principle behind the cap has always been straightforward: families make choices based on what they can afford. Taxpayers do not get a pay rise with each additional child. The welfare system should reflect the same common-sense responsibility. Welfare must be a safety net, not an unlimited commitment. Why should working taxpayers – many of whom cannot afford larger families themselves – be expected to fund ever-bigger households for others? That is not fairness, and it is certainly not sustainable.

Labour knows all of this. Keir Starmer even pledged to keep the cap. But Reeves is being pushed around by her own side. And when your backbenchers decide your Budget for you, it’s the beginning of the end. Reeves is in hock to her hard-left MPs, not to the bond markets, as Andy Burnham – Keir Starmer’s self-appointed successor – has been saying publicly.

Reeves’ weakness will cost the country dear. Only months ago, Reeves tried to take through £5 billion in welfare savings – a move which even if delivered would have seen the bill continuing to skyrocket. But Labour MPs immediately marched her back at the first hurdle. Now she is on the brink of inflating welfare spending by even more.

And who pays? You do.

Because Labour’s welfare expansion comes with a price tag of at least £8 billion in total. And what measure raises almost exactly £8 billion? Freezing income tax and National Insurance thresholds – a stealth tax that Reeves has previously condemned as “hurting working people” and “taking money out of their payslips”.

She promised not to do it. Now she refuses to repeat that promise.

Our own analysis shows this tax trap will cost some families £1,300 over two years – with those households permanently £900 worse off every year thereafter. It is a tax rise designed explicitly to fund Labour’s welfare binge. Nothing more. Nothing less.

This is not a government forced into hard choices. It is a government incapable of facing them.

Reeves has already broken promise after promise. She said she would not raise taxes on working people. She insisted Labour’s plans required ‘no new borrowing’, ‘no new spending’, ‘no new taxes’. Those commitments have not merely been shredded – it is now obvious they were never real in the first place.

Labour did none of the difficult thinking in opposition. They simply assumed they could wing it once in office.

The Conservatives will not make that mistake.

There is an alternative to Labour’s high-tax, high-spend doom loop. We have set out £47 billion in credible savings – including £23 billion from welfare – precisely so we can reduce the deficit responsibly and cut taxes where it matters. Under our Golden Rule, at least half of those savings go directly to bringing down Labour’s deficit immediately; the rest support growth-focused tax cuts such as abolishing stamp duty on the family home, backing high streets by scrapping business rates for thousands of shops and pubs, and helping young workers with a First Job Bonus so they can save for a home and build long-term security.

These are serious policies rooted in Conservative principles: responsibility, work, aspiration.

When your taxes go up this week – when your savings are raided, when your take-home pay shrinks – remember this: it is not because the markets demanded it, or because events forced Labour’s hand. It is because Reeves chose higher welfare, and she has chosen to send the bill to you.

The Conservatives are on the side of the people who work hard, save carefully, and play by the rules. Labour, once again, are not.