This is before the pre-election tax cuts. When Labour get in, those cuts will have been swallowed by the extra inflation they’re going to cause, and it would be too cruel to crank tax up again. The Tories have the power to make this country ungovernable and it looks like they’re going to use it.

No surprise here really. Tories have had a scorched, salted, irradiated, dug up and crapped on earth policy for 14 years.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

The shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, has admitted it would take time for a Labour government to turn Britain around, as she accused the Conservatives of vandalising the economy over the past 14 years.

Speaking before next week’s budget, Reeves said the party that wins the next election would have the worst inheritance of any incoming government since the war and that a national mission was needed to kickstart the economy.

Jeremy Hunt is putting the finishing touches to next Wednesday’s budget, with the Treasury massaging down expectations of the size of an anticipated tax giveaway in light of deteriorating forecasts for the public finances from the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), which will give its final, confidential pre-budget assessment to the Treasury on Friday.

The next government – Conservative or Labour – will inherit the worst set of economic circumstances since the second world war.”

Sketching out Labour’s critique of the government’s economic record since 2010, Reeves said public debt as a share of national output was at the highest level since the 1960s; debt interest payments were at the highest level since the second world war; taxes as a share of national output were the highest since 1949; the economy was smaller than when Rishi Sunak became prime minister in October 2022; and the current parliament was on track to be the first in which living standards – as measured by real household disposable incomes – fell.

But the chancellor’s room for manoeuvre is limited by official forecasts showing he will meet one of his fiscal rules – to have national debt falling in five years’ time – by the narrowest of margins.

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