Britain doesn’t need a Chancellor who calls a flatline a victory — we need one who can stop the rot and get this nation moving again. Rachel Reeves is so out of her depth she doesn’t even understand the scale of her own incompetence. The UK’s public debt is at an all-time high, and last year Reeves borrowed an eye-watering £152 billion — with £105 billion of that just going to service existing debt.

We’re borrowing more money simply to pay the interest on the money we’ve already borrowed. It’s the fiscal equivalent of remortgaging your house every year to pay off the credit card bill you ran up buying champagne you couldn’t afford. And while the ship is sinking, Reeves is standing on deck clapping at the “positive” GDP growth figures of 0.3%.

Snails would scoff at such a pace. Britain is sputtering along while other economies surge ahead, yet our Chancellor hails this limp performance as a “strong start to the year.” If this is her idea of strength, one dreads to think what weakness looks like.

Behind the hollow cheerleading lies a brutal truth: Reeves faces a £50 billion black hole in the public finances. The wafer-thin fiscal “headroom” she inherited has already evaporated. To plug the gap, she is eyeing one thing — raising tax.

In fact that somewhat understates matters because she'll take every tax grab she can get away with — inheritance tax hikes, capital gains tax rises, stealth taxes, sin taxes — all the usual tools of a desperate Treasury that has run out of ideas.

And here’s the sting in the tail: higher taxes will only make things worse. Businesses are already being throttled by her National Insurance hike on employers, spiralling energy costs, and layers of regulatory red tape. Households, crushed by inflation and stagnant wages, are bracing for yet another raid on their pockets.

Reeves isn’t “taxing for growth” — she’s taxing the very life out of the economy. The numbers tell the story. Growth in April and May was negative, only bouncing back in June due to a few isolated boosts in car sales, R&D, and electronics manufacturing.

Household spending — the real engine of our economy — barely grew at all, crawling in at 0.1%. Without a vibrant private sector and confident consumers, there is no sustainable growth.

But Reeves doesn’t get it. She’s doubling down on the same failing model: big borrowing, bigger spending, higher taxes, and a blind faith that the state can drive growth by throwing borrowed money at pet projects.

The Labour Party promised competence. What we’ve got is delusion — a Chancellor celebrating a flatlining economy while running the country deeper into debt and eyeing your savings to keep her plates spinning. Reeves is not steering Britain to stability; she’s loading it with more debt, more tax, and more long-term decline.

Britain doesn’t need a bean-counter in denial. It needs a government with courage, clarity, and the will to unleash private enterprise instead of smothering it. Reeves talks about “rebuilding our national infrastructure” and “cutting red tape,” but the reality is that under her stewardship, the economy is stagnating, confidence is evaporating, and working people will foot the bill for her failures.

We should be aiming to restore economic dynamism, unleash the ingenuity of our entrepreneurs, and create a tax environment that rewards work and investment. Instead, Reeves is locking us into a vicious cycle: slow growth, high taxes, higher borrowing, and even slower growth.

Labour’s economic plan is not a plan for renewal — it’s a roadmap to managed decline. And Rachel Reeves doesn’t even seem to realise she’s holding the map upside down.