The Gentle Insult of a Spring Statement

By The Wobbly Editor, 4 March 2026

Some political performances are even more insulting than any outright lie. They’re the performances that assume that the audience isn’t paying attention, that they can be swayed by presentation rather than substance, and that the increasingly horrible reality of their own lives can be overwritten by a sufficiently confident delivery. I was reminded of this yesterday, watching the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, deliver her Spring Statement.

It was, by any measure, a non-event. A statement notable only for its emptiness. But the emptiness itself was the message. After a bruising few months, a budget that unravelled within days, and a series of damaging U-turns, the Chancellor has evidently been taking advice. The advice appears to have been to disappear from public life for a while, acquire a new haircut and some oratory lessons, and then reappear to tell the country that the plan which is so visibly failing is, in fact, working perfectly.

This is not merely spin. It’s an act of political gaslighting on a national scale. To stand at the dispatch box and declare that the Government has the “right economic plan for our country” on the very day that the official forecaster, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), downgrades growth, raises its forecast for unemployment, and confirms the national tax burden is heading into what it calls “uncharted territory,” is an act of profound disrespect for the intelligence of the electorate.

Let us consider the facts, not the performance. The OBR has revised its forecast for UK economic growth in 2026 down to a meagre 1.1%. It expects unemployment to rise to 5.3% this year, the highest level in a decade. And it confirms that the overall tax burden is on course to reach 38.5% of GDP by 2030-31, the highest sustained level since the Second World War. As a measure of the total tax take from the entire economy, this is a record that this Chancellor seems perversely proud.

Faced with this litany of failure, a serious government would do one of two things: either change course, or present a robust, evidence-based argument for why staying the course will eventually yield results. This Government did neither. The Chancellor offered no new policies, no new ideas, no recognition of the hardship that these figures represent for millions of households and businesses across the South West. Instead, she offered only the mantra: “Our plan is the right one.”  That’s her sound bite and she’s sticking to it.  (Just like she did for ‘fixing the foundations’ and ‘it’s Lizz Truss’ fault.)

The makeover, the carefully modulated tones, the performance of calm competence – all a superficial gloss applied to a deeply flawed product. The problem is not the presentation; it is the product itself. The Chancellor has no plan for growth (ask Wes Streeting). The Spring Statement was an admission of intellectual bankruptcy. I’m tempted to say that there’s nothing left in the tank, but that would indicate there was at least something at some point.  There never was.

The great deception at the heart of this Government’s economic policy is the pretence that stability has been achieved. But the stability they offer is the stability of stagnation. It’s the quiet hum of an economy flatlining. It’s the stability of managed decline. Businesses are not investing, not because they lack “animal spirits”, but because they’re being taxed to the hilt and see no prospect of a return. Young people are not finding work, not because they are lazy, but because the jobs are not being created.

What is most galling is the attempt to frame this failure as a success. Reeves presents a record tax burden not as a consequence of economic mismanagement, but as a necessary component of a sound plan. She speaks of falling inflation as a Government achievement, when it’s a global phenomenon driven by falling energy prices.  All the while, she ignores the domestic policy failures that are driving up costs for businesses and families.

This is not the behaviour of a serious Government. It’s the behaviour of a Government that has run out of road and is now more interested in massaging the message. The quiet, understated nature of yesterday’s Spring Statement was not a sign of confidence. It was a sign of exhaustion. The Chancellor had nothing to say, because there is nothing to be done, because the plan has failed and there is no Plan B. 

The electorate is not stupid. They can see the gap between the rhetoric and the reality. They can feel it in their pay packets, in the price of their shopping, in the lack of opportunities for their children. The gentle insult of the Spring Statement was the assumption that they would not notice. They will.

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