Rachel Reeves has a busy day: the shadow chancellor is giving her big speech tonight, where she is expected to outline the broad brush of her economic policy and claim there is a ‘new chapter in Britain’s economic history’ just waiting to start under a Labour government. Reeves was in the Commons this morning for Treasury Questions, and her focus there was on whether the Tories had a sequel planned for their own National Insurance policy.

Labour has decided that it’s worth exploiting the suggestion

As I reported from the Commons yesterday, Labour has decided that it’s worth exploiting the suggestion from senior Conservative figures that they would like to abolish the ‘double taxation’ of National Insurance. Today, Reeves asked the Chancellor Jeremy Hunt whether he had asked the Office for Budget Responsibility to cost ‘the government’s unfunded plan to abolish National Insurance’.

Hunt didn’t exactly answer the question – though it’s worth pointing out that he didn’t need to because he didn’t announce that the government was abolishing National Insurance in the recent Budget: it’s only an ambition that he and Rishi Sunak have been stating for the future. Instead, he used his party’s attack line that Labour is always changing its mind about where it stands on key issues, saying:

‘I am very glad that the right honourable Lady asks about National Insurance cuts, because first she supported them, then she abstained in the lobby, and now she appears to be against them – like the bankers’ bonus tax, which she was strongly in favour of and then strongly against; like £28 billion of borrowing, which she was strongly in favour of and then strongly against. Is not the actual truth that, where Labour should have an economic policy, there is just a black hole filled with platitudes?’

Reeves then quoted Kwasi Kwarteng saying that governments had to show ‘at least partially’ where the money was coming from to cut taxes, and pressed Hunt to tell her whether it would come from the NHS, the state pension, public services, or ‘increasing taxes, including for pensioners’, or borrowing. Hunt