Exclusive: Chancellor says she made ‘fair and necessary choices’ in budget, and was unwilling to make cuts
Britain’s wealthy must shoulder the burden of paying to rebuild the UK’s “creaky” public services, Rachel Reeves has said, as she warned Labour MPs that leadership speculation was bad for the country.
The chancellor said she had opted to increase taxes by £26bn in this week’s budget to improve schools, hospitals and infrastructure, rejecting calls to “cut our cloth accordingly” after a downgrade in productivity forecasts.
However, she has been mired in a row with the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), which cast doubt on claims that she had dropped plans to raise income tax because of more optimistic forecasts. The body pointed out that she knew about the forecasts well before she had a change of heart.
In an interview with the Guardian, Reeves defended her decision to tax and spend at the budget, saying she had made “fair and necessary choices”.
