There are just two weeks to go until Rachel Reeves’ second Budget. Twelve months after telling the CBI that she was ‘not coming back with more borrowing or more taxes’, she is now planning to do, er, exactly that. All sorts of various measures are being tipped and touted in the newspapers. But the most eye-catching is clearly the mooted rise in the basic rate of income tax. No Chancellor has dared hike this since Denis Healey in 1975: a decision which was followed a year later by the infamous IMF bailout. An encouraging precedent…

Reeves is a history lover, who loves to lecture on Harold Wilson and have pictures of past Labour giants on her wall. But while she is likely to repeat Healey’s tax-raising tradition, she is unwilling to join him in having a tipple at the Budget. By convention

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