Instead of repeating the same lines we’ve heard at every Spending Review since the financial crash, Rachel Reeves should challenge fundamental assumptions about the role of the state, says Joe Hill

Today the Chancellor will announce her first full Spending Review – allocating government budgets over the next three years. It’s a defining moment for the Government to show the public what their priorities are. But it’s going to take more than today’s speech to change the course of history. Because although these fiscal events matter a lot in the short term, I worked on enough of them at the Treasury to suspect that today won’t change the long-run trajectory of the country: managed decline.

The UK is a low-growth, high-spending, high-tax economy. Since the 2008 financial crisis, most of those trends have either not changed or they have worsened. Historically low interest rates helped offset that pain for well over a decade, but now that era is over, we are paying the price for an economy which isn’t sustainable.

The tax burden is at a post-war high. Debt is over 100 per cent of GDP, with very real costs for current budgets. Last year the country spent £105bn on debt interest payments –........

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