It’s no wonder Rachel Reeves is in such a mess ahead of her Budget

On the one hand, I would like to believe what they say. On the other hand, I see what they do and then note the inconsistencies between their words and their actions, and I end up deeply despondent at best or profoundly annoyed and yelling at the television at worst.

When discussing this theme, and in the run-up to next week’s Budget, let me return to the discussion of a politician to whom I feel I have given far too much attention of late and to whom I will be required to give too much attention in the future.

That is, of course, Rachel Reeves.

As Reeves is inclined to tell anyone who will listen, she has spent all her life hoping to become Chancellor, and now she is. You would have thought, in that case, that she would by now have mastered three things.

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The first is economics, but there is absolutely no evidence that this is the case for reasons I will explain below.

The second would be that she would know what she really wanted to achieve as Chancellor, but even now, it appears that she is making this up as she goes along.

Third, after being in Parliament since 2010, it might be presumed that she would have worked out how to communicate her goals, but again, she appears to be entirely out of her depth when it comes to this as well.

Let me explain this with regard to one particular policy that it is understood that she is going to promote and how that conflicts with her stated aim as Chancellor, which is to achieve economic growth. The planned policy in question is her widely trailed plan to increase the rate of employers’ national insurance. It is thought that this might increase from 13.8%, which it is at present, to 15.8% in the Budget next week.

In addition, it is thought that this charge might also be levied on the value of pension contributions an employer makes to a pension fund on their employees’ behalf. This last charge has never been imposed before.

The problem is that Reeves’s words, which claim that she is seeking growth, are completely contradicted by the likely consequences of this planned increase in employers’ national insurance.

That is because although she might think herself to be quite smart to have found a way to recover the 2% cut in national insurance for employees announced by Jeremy Hunt in March this year by now reimposing that charge and by requiring that employers pay it, the resulting likely changes in behaviour will almost certainly create significant economic stress.

That is largely because this new charge will, almost inevitably, reduce the take-home pay of employees throughout the whole of the UK, not least because national insurance charges are not under the control of the Scottish Government.

That is for the simple reason that employers who face this bill will seek to recover it out of future pay rises for their employees, which means those employees will eventually pick up the tab, whatever Reeves might like to claim now. There is strong evidence to suggest that this is what happens. Industrial strife is going to follow as a result. And as working people will then have less to spend, growth will not happen.

Perhaps worse still because public authorities like the NHS, schools, police forces and local authorities, which employ a great many people in Scotland, will have to pay these increased employer national insurance charges, they will, as a consequence, see significant cuts to any hoped-for gains that this Budget might provide to improve the quality of public services.

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This makes this new charge particularly politically inept both economically and politically.

So why does this matter because I would not be writing this unless I thought that it did? My concerns are threefold.

Firstly, I would really like to have politicians who tell the truth. You might call me wildly optimistic for thinking that this might ever be possible, but if it were to happen, then the obvious consequence would be that people’s confidence in the Government would increase, and that appears to me to be really important because, whether we like it or not, we are all heavily dependent on what the Government does to ensure our wellbeing.

Having some reasons to think that those in charge of those services on which we rely might, at the very least, tell us the truth about their intentions is important as a result. I don’t think Reeves has done that. She’s increasing national insurance, and she implied that she would not.

Secondly, there is a precondition for this hope that politicians might tell the truth. That precondition is that they might be competent. The reason why Reeves is in a mess is because she made a manifesto commitment that she would not increase tax on working people. That was incompetent.

As a matter of fact, and contrary to all the claims that Reeves has made about her discovery that there was a black hole in the Government’s finances when she got into office, no-one who knew anything at all about what the Tories have been doing really believed her. That is because it was glaringly obvious to almost every voter in the country that the Tories had made a total mess of the economy well before they were voted out.

If Reeves did not know that, she was either incompetent or she’s not been telling the truth, and since I do not wish to accuse her of lying, then incompetence it has to be. Some might, however, prefer the other option. Her incompetent national insurance policy that will be proposed in reaction to this just makes things worse.

Thirdly, what this then suggests is that we need vastly better-trained politicians. Reeves might like to claim that she spent time working at the Bank of England and in other financial situations before she became an MP, but there is very little evidence that she learned almost anything about how government finances work as a result.

She might know about how to balance her own budget. She has not learned that governments do not need to balance theirs because they can make their own money using their own bank.

That suggests, as a result, that alongside all elected politicians, Reeves needs mandatory training as part of her job to make sure that she really does know how the UK Government and its finances work if they are not to leave us in a total mess. I really do not think that too much to ask.

Reeves does not understand how those finances work. I know that because her words and what she does are totally inconsistent with each other. The consequence is that she is making as much of a mess of her chancellorship as every Tory who went before her over the last 14 years did.

Anyone who believes in the independence of Scotland knows what to do about that.