Rachel Reeves has been skewered by a Sky News presenter for massively hiking taxes just months after saying she had “no plans” to do so.
Trevor Phillips asked the chancellor why “a reasonable person would believe a single word you say” in future.
Reeves was shown a video of her from June 11, three weeks before the general election, where she said: “I don’t need to become chancellor to know what a mess the government have made of public finances, of public services and the fact that the tax burden is at its highest level in 70 years.
“We don’t need higher taxes, what we need is growth and I don’t want to, and I have no plan to increase any taxes beyond what we have already set out.”
But last Wednesday, she announced £40 billion worth of tax rises, partly to fill the £22bn “black hole” Labour says it was left by the last Tory government.
Phillips told her: “You specifically said you already knew everything you needed to know, yet on Wednesday you raised taxes by £40 billion.
“Why would a reasonable person believe a single word that you say in the next 15 minutes and that you’ll stick to it?”
Reeves replied: “I was wrong on June 11. I didn’t know everything, because when I arrived at the Treasury on July 5, I was taken into a room by the senior officials and they set out the huge black hole in the public finances, beyond which anybody knew about at the time of the general election.
“The previous government hid it from the country, hid it from parliament and indeed they hid it from the official independent forecaster, the Office for Budget Responsibility.
“And so when I went into that Budget last week I had to put our public finances back onto a firm trajectory because we saw in the previous parliament what happens when government loses control of the public finances, and the first commitment we made in our manifesto was to bring stability back to the economy.”