So Jeremy Hunt was right and the Chancellor knew she was planning to raise taxes when she announced her cuts to “unfunded” government plans on Monday. But is Reeves’s tax-raising admission based on a lie?

She has said, on the News Agents podcast, that she thinks some taxes will have to rise after she found a £22 billion “hole” in the public finances and committed to raising public sector pay.

Her immediate decision was to scrap some infrastructure projects that represent public investment, cut winter fuel allowance for most pensioners and demand £3 billion of savings from every government department.

But:

Public investment should not be supported with taxation anyway, because it is temporary. It should be supported with borrowing because the money should be paid back with revenues from whatever the project may be, and because it would be wrong for current taxpayers to support an investment that benefits future taxpayers. Borrowing for this purpose also means taxation stays relatively constant.

The National Wealth Fund is a public investment funded with borrowing (from the UK infrastructure bank). GB Energy will be funded by “responsible” borrowing and an increased windfall tax on oil and gas companies – so they can be said to be investing in the future.

When she axed infrastructure projects on Monday, Reeves repeatedly claimed that “if we cannot afford it, we cannot do it” – which is nonsense. The government should not have paid for any of those projects with public money in any event.

So she was lying, wasn’t she? We could afford it – but she didn’t want to do it because it would have required borrowing that breaks her self-imposed fiscal rules.

This brings us to another lie, of course: there is nothing that the UK government cannot afford. That’s a fact that goes back at least as far as John Maynard Keynes, who said, “Anything we can actually do, we can afford.”

Reeves has said the government cannot afford these projects because she wants to stick to her own self-imposed rules that limit spending – and spending is further limited by Labour’s determination to push through its own pet projects. There’s nothing wrong with the latter – but to harp back to the old, false comparison of government spending with household budgets is yet another lie.

In fairness, shadow Chancellor Jeremy Hunt, in criticising Reeves, has also apparently lied.

He said the last Conservative government was “open” about public finances, and this appears to be untrue. The Institute for Fiscal Studies said some of Labour’s claims about hidden spending appear to be correct – such as a massive £6.4 billion on the asylum system (and spending this money was a political choice; the Tories practically halted the processing of asylum claims in order to create hysteria about “illegal immigrants”).

IFS director Paul Johnson also said half of the public spending hole was related to public pay, and the Conservative government had chosen to cause that problem as well. In announcing increases in public pay, Reeves has begun to address this.

The final lie is that Labour wasn’t planning to raise taxes before. Income tax was certainly going to rise for all of us, simply because Labour has not changed a Tory plan to keep tax thresholds at the current level until 2028.

This means the amount we are allowed to earn before we start paying tax at certain levels will stay the same while wages rise – so we will pay more Income Tax, no matter what else happens.

All those public sector workers – junior doctors being the prime example – who are getting above-inflation pay increases will lose significant amounts of those increases back to the government in tax.

Have I missed anything?

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