Here’s Jack Dart’s view of Reeves’ budget and the furore that followed. FWIW, and as someone who considers his views slightly Left-of-Centre, I completely agree with him…

”The reaction to Rachel Reeves’s Budget has been vicious. Since Wednesday, right-wing papers have hurled accusations of deceit, betrayal and incompetence at her, with front pages screaming about “tax bombs” and “Budget lies” and columns insisting she should be driven out of office. The Sun is already pushing polls on whether she should be sacked and calling this the worst Budget in living memory, while the Mail paints a picture of hard-working families crushed so she can splurge on benefits. The tone is not serious economic criticism. It looks like a campaign to topple a Chancellor they never wanted and to poison any Labour attempt to repair the damage they helped create.

These same papers behaved very differently when Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng blew a hole in the public finances. Truss’s mini-Budget was a package of unfunded tax cuts tilted towards higher earners and big business, the kind of experiment any responsible outlet should have treated with deep scepticism. Instead, the Mail splashed “At last! A true Tory Budget” and praised its supposed boldness, while the Sun celebrated a tax-cut “bonanza” that would shower people with extra cash. Then the markets went into freefall, the pound slumped, the Bank of England had to step in to stop pension funds collapsing and mortgage costs spiked for millions. Only at that point did those cheerleaders start to edge away from the wreckage and reinvent themselves as stern critics.

Reeves’s Budget is painful and flawed, but it is nothing like that kamikaze experiment. Her plan raises roughly twenty-odd billion a year in extra tax, mostly from employers and better-off households, and directs some of that money into lifting the two-child cap and shoring up services. The OBR has signed off the numbers. There is a real argument about whether the balance is right, whether the focus on “stability” goes too far, whether more ambitious investment is needed. Instead of engaging with those choices, the right-wing press has jumped straight to branding her a liar, insisting the “black hole” was fabricated and treating every line in the Red Book as proof of moral failure.

What they never acknowledge is their own role in the mess people are living through now. They cheered on austerity, cheered on Brexit, cheered on Truss’s fantasy Budget, and every one of those choices has fed into the weak growth, higher borrowing costs and threadbare services that Reeves is now trying to navigate. When they howl about “tax raids” they rarely mention the mortgage chaos their preferred policies caused, or the hit to pensions and wages from the economic shocks they backed. Their fury at Reeves is about stopping a Labour Chancellor from proving that you can ask those with broader shoulders to contribute more, scrap a cruel policy like the two-child cap, and still keep the markets calm.

We should be tough on this Budget. We should keep asking who pays, who gains and whether the plan matches the scale of the crisis. What we should refuse to do is let the same newspapers that applauded the Truss disaster pose as guardians of responsibility while they try to drag Reeves down. They are defending an ideological project, not your living standards, and their record tells you exactly how much their judgement is worth.”

Here’s a link to Jack Dart’s original FB piece for the Non-Facebook-phobic.