Rachel Reeves’ tax-heavy budget
The Politics Show
The New Statesman
4.2 • 1.5K Ratings
🗓️ 26 November 2025
⏱️ 24 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Tax in Britain will rise to an all-time high following Rachel Reeves’ budget.
The Chancellor has unveiled her latest budget. She’s promised to remove the two-child benefit cap, freeze income tax brackets and introduce a new mansion tax.
Labour deny they are breaking their manifesto pledge to avoid raising income tax, while critics claim the freeze is doing just that.
The Office for Budget Responsibility, who disastrously published their assessment before the Chancellor had made her statement to the House of Commons, say the budget will amount to a tax bill of £28 billion by 2029 – a record high.
Oli Dugmore is joined by Rachel Cunliffe and George Eaton to discuss what the budget means for Britain, the Chancellor, and Keir Starmer’s government.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The New Statesman. |
| 0:06.0 | Do you miss the days when budgets were boring? |
| 0:08.0 | This afternoon's red box was so hotly anticipated. |
| 0:11.0 | We saw U-turns on U-turns before the budget even came into existence. |
| 0:15.0 | Not to mention an absolute clanger from the OBR, |
| 0:18.0 | who published their response before Rachel Reeves had even stood up. |
| 0:21.5 | Finally, Labor's economic plan has been announced. To discuss what this actually means for people |
| 0:26.8 | and their purses, I'm joined by Rachel Cunniff. Hello. Hello. And George Eaton, hello. |
| 0:30.8 | Hello. Rachel, do you want to kick us off, major talking points? What were the headlines? |
| 0:33.7 | So I think the major headline is that pretty much everything in this budget had been |
| 0:38.7 | heavily briefed beforehand. So if you had an idea of kind of what the budget was going to be |
| 0:43.3 | this morning, most of it was confirmed. I think big news is tax rises of 26 billion over the |
| 0:51.8 | course of the Romanians of the Parliament, which is big, which gives Rachel |
| 0:56.9 | Reeves over double her fiscal headroom without having to pull one of those three tax |
| 1:02.5 | levers. So we didn't get the increase in income tax that we thought we might be getting |
| 1:07.0 | two weeks ago and then realised that we weren't getting. So instead, that money is coming |
| 1:11.9 | from a variety of tax sources, the biggest of which is continuing the Conservatives freeze on |
| 1:18.3 | tax thresholds. And then there are things like paper mile road taxing for electric vehicles. |
| 1:24.8 | There's the mansion tax that we've been talking about this week. There's the milkshake tax we've been talking about this week. There's |
| 1:27.5 | the milkshake tax we've been talking about this week. Generally, all of those together add up to 26 billion. |
| 1:33.0 | And then on the spending side, the thing that Labor MPs are going to be sort of having as their |
| 1:38.6 | headline for the rest of this week and probably for the rest of the parliament is cutting the or getting rid |
... |
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