Rachel Reeves will flick through a “Corbynist catalogue” of tax rises ahead of this year’s budget, the Conservatives have warned.
Ms Reeves denied the Treasury would produce a “repeat” of last October’s budget and said the Government had “already drawn a line under the Tory mismanagement”.
But shadow chancellor Sir Mel Stride told MPs that Wednesday’s spending review was a “fantasy” and “not worth the paper that it is written on”.
Responding to Ms Reeves’s spending plans, the Conservative frontbencher told the Commons: “This is the spend now, tax later review, because (the Chancellor) knows she will need to come back here in the autumn with yet more taxes and a cruel summer of speculation awaits.
“How can we possibly take this Chancellor seriously after the chaos of the last 12 months?”
Sir Mel labelled Ms Reeves “the tinfoil Chancellor, flimsy and ready to fold in the face of the slightest pressure”, who he said was “weak, weak, weak”.
He added: “She is constantly teetering on the edge of blowing her fiscal rules, which she already changed to allow even more borrowing.
“And the only way she can claim to be meeting her rules is by pretending that she can control spending over the coming years.”
As part of the Government’s plans, departmental budgets are forecast to grow by an annual average of 2.3% across the period 2023/24 to 2028/29.
Ms Reeves also promised a “record cash investment in our NHS”, with an extra £29 billion per year for day-to-day running costs, plus money for rail projects including £3.5 billion additional funding for the TransPennine route upgrade between York and Manchester, and £2.5 billion more for the Cambridge-to-Oxford East West Rail.
“The Chancellor knows she will have to come back in the autumn with more tax rises to fund these plans,” Sir Mel said.
“Or can she assure us right now that this is not the case? Yes or no?”
Referring to the former Labour leader and now independent MP for Islington North Jeremy Corbyn, Sir Mel said: “We know that the Deputy Prime Minister (Angela Rayner) has helpfully provided her with an entire brochure of tax rises that she will no doubt be perusing over the summer, the ‘Corbynist catalogue’.”
He told MPs: “Her tone today suggests that all is well, the sunny uplands await.
“What a hopeless conceit. A masterclass in delusion.”
Ms Reeves hit back that Sir Mel was “Stride by name, ‘baby steps’ by nature”.
She said he had “welcomed our nuclear investment of £30 billion” and continued: “But he said it’s not enough. He welcomed our defence investments of £11 billion, but he said it was not enough.
“He and his party opposed the decisions that this Government has taken to make those announcements possible, by voting against the budget in October last year.
“You can’t spend the money if you won’t raise the money. Now, that’s a lesson from Liz Truss that he has already forgotten.
“He complains about the level of investment that I’ve announced, ignoring the fact that the reason this investment is so important is because his party oversaw 14 years of cratering investment, stagnating wages and public service collapse.”
She said the more comprehensive budget later this year will “set out in the round all of the fiscal plans” and added: “We have already drawn a line under the Tory mismanagement with tax rises last year.
“And we will never have to repeat a budget like that again, because we will never have to clean up after the mess that the party opposite made.”
