Rachel Reeves just blew £600billion – this autumn YOU get the bill | Personal Finance | Finance

Labour Chancellors are particularly good at it. Today’s Spending Review was Reeves’s first big opportunity to cut loose.

Spending public money is always more fun than the hard work of saving it, as she’s already discovered to her cost.

Axing the winter fuel payment and trimming disability benefits sparked uproar – and a Labour civil war. Now Reeves hoped to win the party back.

So out rolled the commitments. More cash for schools, defence, the police, asylum, the steel industry, Heathrow expansion, Sizewell C and, of course, the NHS.

There was far less detail on how she plans to pay for any of it.

Pressed by Shadow Chancellor Mel Stride, Reeves refused to explain, merely repeating her mantra that “we will never have to repeat a Budget like that again”.

By that she means last autumn’s Budget, which hit us with £40billion of taxes, wiped out 100,000 jobs and stalled the economy.

The next one, Reeves insists, won’t be as severe – but I suspect it will still hurt like hell.

Stride called today the “spend now, tax later review”.

He said Reeves knows she’ll need to return in the autumn with yet more taxes and warned we face “a cruel summer of speculation” while we wait.

Just like last year, that speculation will cause serious economic damage.

After the 2024 election, markets began to panic over the “difficult decisions” Reeves had threatened to make in her autumn Budget.

Consumers stopped spending, businesses froze investment, confidence vanished. Now we’re braced for a repeat.

Reeves says she will honour Labour’s pledge not to raise income tax, national insurance or VAT, the three biggest taxes of all. So the money will have to come from hiking a smaller range of taxes instead.

An extended income tax threshold freeze, inheritance tax clampdown, more capital gains tax, a big fuel duty hike – all are now on the table.

Reeves made a virtue of taxing to fund her spending. But if the burden becomes too great and growth stalls, tax revenues could fall instead.

There’s also the small matter of Britain’s national debt. The UK now spends more than £100billion a year servicing debt interest, money Reeves could have done with today.

This leaves her at the mercy of bond markets.

If investors think Reeves has lost control, our borrowing costs could spiral and become unaffordable. A full-blown financial crisis is not out of the question.

Reeves said today that Labour has brought “stability”. Such ridiculous claims make her seem completely detached from reality. Talking of which, she still founds billions for Ed Miliband to squander.

Today, she had her fun spending money. She won’t have as much fun raising taxes in the autumn. And nor will we.