Rachel Reeves has approached this week’s budget like a reluctant swimmer inching into freezing water, trying to ease the unpleasantness by incremental exposure. The chancellor started paddling delicately around the problem of insufficient revenue at the end of the summer. First, she refused to stand by former insistence that tax rises in last year’s budget would be the last. “The world has changed,” she said.

Then, earlier this month, she took a bigger stride into the icy waves. There was a speech promising to “do what is necessary” to fund public services and keep borrowing costs down. Downing Street did not discourage speculation that this meant reneging on Labour’s 2024 manifesto promise not to raise income tax. Too deep! Within 10 days the Treasury had retracted the hint. The manifesto commitment still stood after all. As any cold-water swimmer knows, this aborted plunge and shivering retreat is the worst of all techniques. Nothing prolongs the pain like indecision.

It is hard to be decisive when choosing between degrees of self-inflicted harm. Breaking an unambiguous campaign pledge would have simplified Reeves’s fiscal challenge but shredded her remaining political authority. The alternative route, chosen after some vacillation, is to carry on raising many small taxes instead of one big one. The political cost might be the same, but it is spread out over a longer period, during which the chancellor can hope that something – a productivity and growth miracle – will turn up.

Hope has not been a great strategy for this government. At the core of Keir........

© The Guardian