Rachel Reeves denies lying about Budget black hole to justify £26bn tax hikes

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

51% : While the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) did deliver a productivity downgrade that wiped £16bn off expected tax receipts, much of that was cancelled out by inflation and higher wage growth, leaving a £4.2bn surplus against Ms Reeves's borrowing rules.
50% : Rachel Reeves has denied lying to the public over the state of the country's finances to justify £26bn worth of tax hikes in the Budget.
46% : " She also denied Labour had broken its manifesto pledge not to raise taxes, but conceded that she was asking people to pay more.
46% : Despite this, in a major speech in Downing Street on 4 November, Ms Reeves said that weaker economic productivity had had "consequences for the public finances" and suggested tax rises were still necessary to tackle a £20bn gap.
41% : On Sunday, the chancellor said that even with a £4bn surplus, she would have been left with the lowest headroom any chancellor had secured against their fiscal rules, and this also did not take into account decisions such as the U-turn on cutting winter fuel payments or welfare reform, or the abolition of the two-child benefit cap.
39% : "She was raising taxes to pay for welfare...
38% : She said: "The people I was thinking about were kids who I know in my constituency go to school hungry and go to bed in cold and damp homes, and from April next year those parents will have a bit more support to help their kids." But Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch accused the chancellor of "raising taxes to pay for welfare" and said she "should resign".
18% : " She said the shadow chancellor, Sir Mel Stride, had written to the FCA calling for an investigation "because it looks like what she was doing was trying to pitch-roll her Budget - tell everyone how awful it would be and then they wouldn't be as upset when she finally announced it - and still sneak in those tax rises to pay for welfare.

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.