When Martin Amis published his first novel in 1973, The Times Literary Supplement described it as “scurrilous, shameless and very funny”. It was called The Rachel Papers. In response to the swathes of material released by the Chancellor of the Exchequer on Wednesday – and accidentally published early by the Office for Budget Responsibility (sic!) – some people (admittedly in a very different context) might have agreed with the first two of those adjectives. The ‘very funny’ bit? I think not so much.

Rachel Reeves had a tough job. She felt constrained by Labour’s 2024 reckless election manifesto commitment not to raise income tax, VAT or national insurance, this even though she had already increased employers’ national insurance contributions in her first budget, a step which in the opinion of many has caused huge harm to the jobs’ market. This time around she could not claim the situation was more dire than she had envisaged after 14 years of Conservative government; she has been in charge of the shop for the past 16 months. The reality is that Labour should never have made those manifesto commitments but they did so in order to get elected. As the much-respected Institute of Fiscal Studies said at the time, both Labour and the Tories were in denial about the close-to-catastrophic state of the public finances. Now we are all paying the price.

In early November, Reeves had, in a break from normal practice, embarked on a round of ‘pitch-rolling’ (apologies for using a cricketing metaphor at this challenging Ashes time), seemingly to pave the way for announcing an increase in income tax in the budget. It could be argued, semantically, that she did not do that; the headline rate did not go up. But by freezing tax thresholds for the next five years she has ensured that more people will be drawn into paying income tax and more people will be paying higher rates of tax. The effect amounted to £30 billion worth of tax hikes over that period, by the end of which the overall tax burden will be 38% of national income. That is an all-time high, required not least to subsidise the record sums being paid out in benefits.

Last month, Labour seemed to have hit upon a slightly different strategy, as summarised by a headline in The Times: ‘Starmer to blame budget pain on Farage and Brexit’. The EU referendum was in 2016 but the point has validity. As the World Trade Organisation explained, “the UK is a highly trade-dependant economy”. For example, the export of manufactured goods fell from 45% in 2020, when we finally left the EU, to 37% last year. This summer’s reset deal with the EU is reckoned to be worth around £650 million a year. The Liberal Democrats claim that if the UK rejoined the EU customs union, that would be worth at least £25 billion a year. The LibDem leader, Ed Davey, was essentially banging on about this point in the House of Commons on Wednesday.

I’m not an expert on any numbers here. But I do know one thing. It might indeed be of significant economic advantage to do that, and likewise perhaps also to rejoin the single market. But politically? We would thereby be signing-up to become rules-takers from the EU. When we were actually part of the European Union, we were rules-makers.