No one will remember Rachel Reeves’s speech yesterday or her fantasy spending review for long, possibly including the Chancellor herself.

This is because it will soon be overtaken by events. Reeves’s plans will have to be adjusted to take account of reality. Much of what she promised will never come to pass, but something she didn’t tell us about most certainly will. More tax rises.

Ms Reeves can be compared to a brisk doctor who, confronted with a patient who is short of breath and experiencing alarming palpitations, pronounces that there is absolutely nothing to worry about and things are bound to get better.

Her greatest delusion is that her disastrous Budget last October has miraculously set Britain on the road to recovery. She preposterously claimed that Labour ‘had wasted no time in removing the barriers to growth’ and had restored ‘stability’.

Where is the evidence for growth and where is the stability? It’s true that, in the first three months of 2025, the economy is estimated to have grown by 0.7 per cent, but this came after a contraction in the final quarter of 2024. Reputable forecasters concur that the economy will expand by around a measly one per cent this year.

The Chancellor had the effrontery to invoke stability the day after official figures showed that a quarter of a million jobs have disappeared since the Budget as a result of higher employer National Insurance Contributions and an increased minimum wage.

Remember that inflation has risen to 3.5 per cent, and it will probably go up further. Government borrowing in the year to March was a massive £151.9billion, which is £14.6billion more than was forecast by the Office for Budget Responsibility.

Meanwhile, nurses and junior doctors are flexing their muscles and seem likely to reject pay offers that in the circumstances in which we find ourselves – namely that the country is running out of money – seem recklessly generous.

Rachel Reeves's greatest delusion is that her disastrous Budget last October has miraculously set Britain on the road to recovery, writes Stephen Glover

There is no stability and there is precious little growth. Yet Rachel Reeves feels able to spray huge sums of money in most directions – almost £300billion more during this Parliament than the Tories had planned, according to her.

Total departmental spending goes up 2.3 per cent a year in real terms. The inefficient NHS does even better with a 3 per cent increase in day-to-day budgets until 2029, at a cost of £29billion a year. How much of this will result in better patient care?

And while it’s true that some departments, such as the Home Office, suffer slight reductions, there is more money for schools, plus £39billion for affordable housing over the next ten years. That the Chancellor should think she can lay down spending plans for the next decade demonstrates just how deluded she is.

We all want better hospitals and schools. More roads. New nuclear power stations. Stronger defence too, though Ms Reeves proposes to raise expenditure to 2.6 per cent of GDP in 2027, where it stops and shows no signs of advancing towards the Government’s stated ‘ambition’ of 3 per cent.

We desire these things. But in our present predicament we can’t have them all, at least not all at once. We have to cut our cloth according to our means. Rachel Reeves is a ‘spend, spend, spend’ Chancellor who gorges herself on things we can’t afford with money we haven’t got.

No, we won’t remember yesterday’s speech for the detail of its spending plans, some of which – such as the pledge to stop using hotels to house asylum seekers – carry no credibility whatsoever.

However, we will recall the spending review as providing final proof that the Chancellor has no inkling of the mess this country is in. Like many of her Labour predecessors, she is never happier than when racking up debt, which is already at a peacetime high.

The British State is grossly bloated, yet far from advising that it should go on a diet, or at any rate restrict its gargantuan appetite, Ms Reeves merrily throws more nourishment into the monster’s mouth.

For me the most interesting aspect of her speech was the lack of any mention of significant spending cuts. She merely claimed to have ‘found savings’ from ‘the closure and sale of government buildings and land; cutting-back office costs; and reducing consultancy spend’.

The Chancellor maintained that she had been ‘relentless in driving out inefficiencies’ and promised to be ‘relentless in calling out waste’. Most tellingly, she said that ‘every single penny’ saved would be ‘reinvested back into our public services’.

I don’t imagine many spare pennies will be found but, if Rachel Reeves were to come across a few, shouldn’t they be used to reduce our mountain of debt, the interest on which is already £100billion a year and rising, which is about twice the UK defence budget?

The Chancellor maintained that she had been ‘relentless in driving out inefficiencies’ and promised to be ‘relentless in calling out waste’, says Stephen Glover

The tragedy is that the Government is showing scant interest in reducing public expenditure. It is spending more and more in the hope that economic growth will one day generate enough tax revenues to pay down debt. As the State grows ever larger, there’s no reason to suppose that this growth will ever materialise.

Why are we employing more civil servants not fewer? New figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show that the UK civil service grew by 2,000 in the first three months of this year to reach its highest level for nearly two decades. In March 2025 some 550,000 people were employed in the civil service.

According to the ONS, productivity in the public sector as a whole – a measure of the output per hour worked – is lower than it was in 1997, and 8.5 per cent below pre-pandemic levels at the end of 2019. Is Rachel Reeves proposing to crack down? You know the answer.

Then there is welfare, which stands at an all-time high. The Government has recently produced some modest plans to trim the soaring welfare budget by a few billion pounds, but even these are likely to be watered down or withdrawn as a result of a Labour backbench rebellion.

Are we really to believe that there is no significant wastage in an annual government public spending budget of £1,280billion? Of course there is. Needless to say, Sir Keir Starmer and other minsters haven’t evinced the slightest inclination to find it.

The Government spends too much. It also taxes us too much – more than ever before in peacetime. Yet instead of trying to spend less, it intends, as we witnessed in Rachel Reeves’s characteristically ham-fisted speech, to lavish ever larger sums, which will inevitably lead to higher taxes – and economic sclerosis.

It is like watching a ghastly slow motion accident. This one will take four years to play out, and when it is over there will be numerous bodies strewn over the ground – the bodies of the British people.

I don’t know who will then rescue us, or even whether there exists someone capable of doing so. All I am certain of is that Labour and Rachel Reeves are leading us unfailingly to disaster.