Reeves prepares the public for tax hikes
Coffee House Shots
The Spectator
4.4 • 2.1K Ratings
🗓️ 4 November 2025
⏱️ 12 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
It is three weeks until the Budget – and Rachel Reeves wants to get her narrative out there. The Chancellor held an early morning press conference today to, in her words, ‘set out the circumstances and the principles’ guiding her thinking on 26 November.
Her speech followed a familiar pattern. First, there was the evisceration of the ‘austerity’, ‘reckless borrowing’ and ‘stop go of public investment’ which characterised the last 14 years. In her 25-minute speech in Downing Street, one line in particular stood out: ‘If we are to build the future of Britain together’, Reeves said, ‘we will all have to contribute to that effort. Each of us must do our bit.’
Crucially, she refused to rule out breaking her manifesto pledge not to raise income tax, national insurance or VAT. Megan McElroy discusses the groundwork she's laying for the budget with James Heale and Michael Simmons.
See the graph Michael refers to here: https://data.spectator.co.uk/polls
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Transcript
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| 0:40.5 | Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shots, The Spectator's Daily Politics Podcast. |
| 0:44.6 | I'm Megan McElroy and I'm joined today by Michael Simmons and James Heel. |
| 0:49.0 | Michael, Rachel Reeves gave what's been described as an unusual speech this morning at the very |
| 0:54.0 | disrespectful time |
| 0:54.8 | of 815. The headline is that she's refused to rule out tax rises in the budget. Does this |
| 1:01.5 | mean that taxes are going up? Yeah, I mean, we've been saying this for the last few episodes, |
| 1:05.5 | right? Tax rises are inevitable if you look at the numbers, but also in her language, right? She's |
| 1:10.6 | expressly multiple times, |
| 1:12.6 | not ruled it out. Some of the language she used today was, you know, we all need to chip in, |
| 1:18.1 | we all need to do our bit, which I would take to mean that she's looking at broad tax rises, |
| 1:23.3 | so potentially income tax, not just taxes or on mansions or the wealthy. I think it was an unusual |
| 1:30.1 | speech because, again, it picked up on this premise that the reason for the black hole, the reason |
| 1:36.3 | for the economic malise that we find ourselves in is because of things that happened under the last |
| 1:41.1 | government. So things like Brexit, things like the pandemic and |
| 1:45.7 | the spending increases we had to make there. But I think that's quite an odd way to frame things |
... |
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