It might not have been a Budget, but the Chancellor may well wish that it had been. Constrained by her fiscal rules and her own insistence that yesterday’s statement would not constitute a major event, Rachel Reeves was left shuffling the few cards she held in search of a better hand.

The search was in vain.

Despite deploying the kind of rhetoric normally associated with a full-fat fiscal event, by the time the Chancellor sat down it was hard to see what had changed. It’s true that relatively modest policy changes (such as a few billion shaved off a welfare budget that’s expected to reach £70bn by 2030) will have........

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