Starmer is getting a battering from political editors at his here-comes-Keir-to-save-the-Budget press conference. Political editors who are distinctly annoyed that they were deceptively briefed by Treasury figures in the run up to the Winter Budget…
Sky News pol ed Beth Rigby accused Reeves of misleading the public by pretending that the £16 billion productivity downgrade was not counteracted in OBR forecasts by higher tax receipts from wage growth.
“There was no misleading. I simply don’t accept that being told the OBR productivity review shows you have £16 billion less is an easy start… to suggest that a government that is saying that’s not a good starting point is misleading is wrong in my view. As I say, there was a point at which we did think we would have to breach the manifesto in order to achieve what we wanted to achieve. Later on it became possible to do it without the manifesto breach. Given the choice between the two I didn’t want to breach the manifesto.”
Starmer said “of course there were other figures” and insisted the Budget contained “the right steps for our country and I’m proud that we’ve taken them.” Starmer is also insisting the black hole existed because the government didn’t have enough cash to pay for the policies it wanted – a novel definition of black hole…
