Reeves is now taking questions.Beth Rigby from Sky News goes first.Q: Will you stick to your manifesto promise not to raise the taxes that working people pay? And, if you won’t, doesn’t that make a mockery of the trust people put in you at the election?Reeves replied:I will set out the individual policies of the budget until the 26th of November.That’s not what today is about.Today is about setting the context up for that budget.

And your viewers can see the challenges that we face, the challenges that are on a global nature.And they can also see the challenges in the long-term performance of our economy.And the Office for Budget Responsibility will set all that out.They’ve done the review of the supply side of the economy that looks at the past, but they use the past to predict the future.As chancellor, I have to face the world as it is, not the world that I want it to be.

And when challenges come our way, the only question is the how to respond to them, not whether to respond, or not.And as I respond on the budget 26 November, my focus will be on getting NHS waiting lists down, getting the cost of living down and also getting the national debt down.And this is what the SNP is saying about Rachel Reeves’s speech, in a statement from the party’s economic spokesperson at Westminster, Dave Doogan.The Labour party misled voters.They promised things would get better but under Keir Starmer they’ve got even worse.

Brexit Britain is broken and families are being forced to foot the bill for Labour Party failure.Labour stood on a manifesto promise of not increasing taxes - it’s clear they knew this wasn’t going to be true …With Broken Brexit Britain in constant crisis, Scotland needs a fresh start with independence.The Liberal Democrats claim that Rachel Reeves’s speech this morning was pointless.Daisy Cooper, the party’s Treasury spokesperson, said:This wasn’t pitch rolling, it was pointless.It’s clear that this budget will be a bitter pill to swallow as the government seems to have run out of excuses.

The government can’t keep punishing households, high streets and hospices while big banks, gambling companies and social media giants don’t pay their fair share,And, in a response from Reform UK, the party’s deputy leader Richard Tice said:Rachel Reeves has today confirmed what we all knew - she’s going to hammer working people with even more tax rises,Instead of cutting waste and spending, deregulating and optimising for growth, we are just getting more of the same,Peter Walker is the Guardian’s senior political correspondent,Kemi Badenoch has argued that Rachel Reeves should be blaming herself, not the Conservatives, for any tax rises in the budget.

Answering questions after her own speech in central London on the economy and welfare, Reeves said:It is utterly ridiculous to see Rachel Reeves stand there blaming everybody except herself.Unemployment has risen every single month since Labour came into office, but she wants to blame me for that.That’s crazy.She should look at her jobs tax.Look at what she did in the budget.

No one in the cabinet had private sector business experience, Badenoch said.If we’re going to get our country working again, we need people who understand the economy, people who work in the private sector, people who run a business.Reeves, she said, “doesn’t have a plan”, adding:If she had a plan, she would be talking about what she was going to do other than tax rises.All she’s doing is blaming everyone else.This is a chancellor who’s back against the wall.

She doesn’t know what she’s doing.Q: If the government raises the basic rate of income tax, would you reverse it?Badenoch says Reeves should not be doing that.But she says, if the government does that, it will change the economic framework the Tories would inherit.She says the Tories have already promised to reverse some tax increases, like the inheritance tax on farms, VAT on school fees and the windfall tax on energy companies.Q: Do you agree that the pensions triple lock is unsustainable in the long term?Badenoch says the triple lock was brought in by the Tories to help pensioners on fixed incomes.

She says getting rid of the triple lock would not be a growth policy,Q: Isn’t the choice now between tax rises under Labour and austerity under the Conservatives?No, Badenoch says,She says there is an alternative – cutting the welfare bill,Q: You said Nigel Farage’s proposed tax cuts aren’t realistic,So why are yours realistic?Badenoch claims the Tories have said where theirs would come from.

And they would cut taxes to stimulate economic activity, she says.Q: [From Sky’s Beth Rigby] Boris Johnson proposed to put up national insurance, in breach of Tory manifesto promises.And Liz Truss broke promises with her mini budget.How can people trust the Conservatives?Badenoch accuses Rigby of reading out Reeves’s briefing notes.She says the last government had to deal with the pandemic.

She says Labour does not have any justification like that.Q: Does Reeves have a point when she says the last government put political expediency above the national interest?Badenoch says “it is utterly ridiculous to see Rachel Reeves blaming everybody except herself”.Kemi Badenoch has finished her speech and is now taking questions.Q: [From ITV’s Carl Dinnen] Reeves said productivity is worse than people realised.How much is that the Tories’ fault?Badenoch says Reeves should consider what the government has done that might have made this worse.

She says productivity fell during the pandemic.She says productivity is particularly bad in the public sector.And she says the Tories would cut red tape, which would help with productivity.Kemi Badenoch is delivering a speech in Westminster now, and she is using it to respond to Rachel Reeves.Her broad argument is that, if Labour were serious about cutting public spending, as she says the Tories, tax rises would not be necessary.

This morning we saw the extraordinary spectacle of a chancellor, just days before a budget, rushed into a panic speech.We were told that this was the great moment when Labour would show they had a plan for growth.Instead what we got was a masterclass in managed decline, a chancellor claiming she was just going to set the context, but instead of clarity business leaders are none the wiser, investors are confused.workers are anxious because the truth is Labour doesn’t have a plan to get Britain working again.The chancellor’s speech was one long waffle bomb, a laundry list of excuses.

She blamed absolutely everybody else for the choices, her own decisions, her own failures.“Pitch rolling” (see 8.03am) is difficult because it involves managing expectations, and persuading reporters, analysts and voters that something meaningful has been said, without the use of firm, specific announcements.In the circumstances, Rachel Reeves achieved quite a lot.If there were any people left this morning whole a) had at least took a minimal interest in politics and b) did not realise that the budget is going to involve very large tax increases, they will now be a little wiser.

Reeves made it clear to anyone who listened to her speech and Q&A that large tax rises are coming.Most of us knew that already.What was more interesting was what Reeves said in response to the many questions she got about breaking the manifesto tax promises.On the basis of her replies, it might be rash to say it is 100% certain that this is what Reeves and Keir Starmer will do.But what is apparent is that Reeves has swallowed her objections to that notion.

She now seems to have been persuaded by the argument that raising one of the big three taxes she promised not to put up (income tax, national insurance or VAT) would be better than resorting to a short-term fix (see 8,22am, 8,30am, 8,40am and 9,11am) and that voters will accept the case for this decision (see 9.

21am).That is a significant shift.Only a few weeks ago, as speculation started to build that the government would have to break a manifesto promise, Reeves was reportedly strongly resistant to the idea.Some people may suspect that this is all part of some clever expectation management ruse, and that on 26 November Reeves will surprise everyone by not breaking her manifesto pledges.Perhaps.

But the chancellor’s plight really is quite dire; it seems far more probable that today she was genuinely hoping to get some credit for candour, not just trying hoodwink pundits in the lobby.One option Reeves may be considering is the one proposed by the Resolution Foundation – raising income tax by 2p in the pound, but reducing employee national insurance by an equivalent 2p.While this would be a technical breach of the manifesto, Reeves could argue that she was somehow respecting it in spirit (because for most working people the cut would cancel out the rise).The measure would still raise £6bn.In its report today, the Resolution Foundation says:[This move would] particularly raise taxes on pensioners, the self-employed and some capital income, who all face lower tax rates than working-age employees.

But pensioners’ living standards have increased by much more than those of working age – typical pensioner incomes have increased by 21 per cent over the past 20 years compared with just 4 per cent for those of working age – and with the state pension going up £560 next April, only pensioners with incomes above £40,000 would be worse off overall in cash terms.During her speech Rachel Reeves included a passage attacking Reform UK and the Conservatives for their budget proposals.This is what she said;My opponents will tell you that they could do more.Reform promised savings from our public services.And yet in Kent county councill, and councils they run across Britain, apparently they can’t find a single penny and instead plan to increase council tax on more than two million people.

And the Conservatives, who promised £47bn, when, during 14 years in power they oversaw rising welfare costs and a growing civil service,What are they doing for 14 years?Let us be clear; there is no way that cuts on that scale – equivalent to cutting our entire armed forces or cutting every single police officer in the country, twice over – could be delivered without devastating consequences for our public services,Austerity, reckless borrowing made-up numbers – they are the problems, solutions,TThey are the mistakes of the past, which would only take us backwards,I will not repeat them.