Is Rachel Reeves a liar? No. But she is guilty of the sin of omission.

Earlier this month, the Chancellor presented an excessively bleak economic outlook to justify, at the Budget, politically driven tax increases instead of those strictly needed for financial reasons.

To untangle this current row, rewind to Reeves’s extraordinary breakfast-time speech in Downing Street on November 4. She heavily implied she was facing a black hole in the public finances – partly due to a downgrade to productivity forecasts expected from the fiscal watchdog, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR).

During that speech, the Chancellor told the public that weaker productivity had “consequences for the public finances” in the form of “lower tax receipts”. She was setting the stage for tax rises in her Budget. She went further in a BBC radio interview six days later, strongly hinting at a manifesto-breaking hike in income tax.

While the OBR did deliver a productivity downgrade that wiped £16 billion off expected tax receipts, much of that was cancelled out by inflation and higher wage growth, leaving a £4.2bn surplus against Reeves’s own borrowing rules.

Caught up in a row over whether she misrepresented the overall picture, Reeves

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