The chancellor was on the morning media rounds on Thursday claiming that, technically, she has not broken the manifesto promise not to raise income tax, VAT or national insurance contributions “for working people”.
Rachel Reeves’s argument is that, because the rates themselves have remained the same, she has kept her word – despite the fact that hundreds of thousands more people will end up paying higher income tax due to fiscal drag.
The manifesto said: “Labour will not increase taxes on working people, which is why we will not increase national insurance, the basic, higher, or additional rates of income tax, or VAT.”
Pressed on whether she broke that manifesto promise, she responded: “I do recognise that yesterday, I have asked working people to contribute a bit more by freezing those thresholds for a further three years from 2028. I do recognise that that will mean that working people pay a bit more.”
Pressed again on whether Labour had broken the manifesto pledge not to raise taxes on working people, she said: “If you go on to read the next line, it talks about the rates. But I am not denying that this has an impact on working people.”
For the 1.7 million people who will see a rise in their tax bill as a result of the income tax threshold freeze, that will probably ring hollow and sound like a semantic argument.
And they have a powerful ally who agrees Labour has in fact broken the pledge: the chancellor herself.
In her 2024 Budget speech, she told MPs: "I have come to the conclusion that extending the threshold freeze would hurt working people. It would take more money out of their payslips.
“I am keeping every single promise on tax that I made in our manifesto.”
This is the second year in a row that Ms Reeves has used semantics to excuse an apparent breach of the manifesto commitment.
Last year’s massive hike in employers’ national insurance contributions actually broke the manifesto pledge, which only listed national insurance and did not differentiate between employee or employer contributions.
But she and Labour insisted at the time it was only employee contributions, which were covered because of the focus being on “working people”.
The breach of the pledge is probably best highlighted by the change of language in the Budget speech.
Until recently, every second sentence specifically noted “working people” – whether the words were being delivered by Ms Reeves, the prime minister or another senior minister.
But now the language has shifted away with barely any reference to “working people” and has largely been replaced with “fairness”.
It may be that part of the problem was that Ms Reeves and Labour were never able to really define who “working people” were, with the Treasury at one point assuming it was just people who earned less than £45,000 a year.
The question often embarrassed both the chancellor and Sir Keir Starmer when pressed to define this core group.
So “working people”, along with “economic growth” (the now former No 1 mission of this government), have been downgraded to footnotes.
It reflected a turn to the left by a chancellor desperate to keep her job and save her boss from a potential coup.
Critics point out that working people seem to be less of a priority than those on benefits with the welfare bill going up £73bn by 2030 to more than £400bn, and pensioners who keep the triple lock guarantee on the state pension and are exempt from the new limits on cash ISA savings imposed on working people.
As Ms Reeves and her colleagues try to use semantics over the coming days and weeks to justify a Budget which went against many things they promised in last year’s election, they are going to struggle because their own past words will catch up with them.
She said the media and Tories “are not going to write her obituary” – but maybe she has actually written her own one.
