It was like your worst nightmare. Same old Labour. Same old myths. Same old lies. In her budget today, Rachel Reeves shamelessly broke Labour’s election promises in an extraordinary display of triumphalist economic vandalism, wishful thinking and deceit.

Labour promised not to raise taxes on working people, repeatedly, and claimed that anyone who said otherwise was lying. Yet today Reeves raised taxes not by a bit, but by an astronomical £40 billion – which will hit working people, businesses, jobs, aspiration and the very entrepreneurialism that drives the country forward.

By my calculation, that £40 billion – higher than even the most pessimistic forecasts – amounts to more than £2,000 for each family in the country. Rishi Sunak was right all along. You can’t trust the Labour Party.

And what about borrowing? Reeves has moved the goalposts to allow her to borrow an eye-watering £50 billion more, which will be added to Britain’s already humongous post-Covid, post-Ukraine debt burden, forcing future generations to pay yet more for today’s profligacy.

Already, our debt repayment each year is greater than our education budget. And that’s going to rise far more in the years ahead, as Reeves splurges.

Labour repeatedly pretends that it is going for growth. Yet this budget, even according to the most optimistic OBR forecasts, will actually lead to lower growth, higher interest rates and higher inflation.

It taxes business and jobs, discourages investment and massively grows our already bloated state. Reeves herself once proclaimed that raising employers’ national insurance was a tax on jobs.

Yet she’s now raising that very tax by a stonking £25 billion while discouraging businesses from hiring lower-paid workers, with a huge rise in the minimum wage and French-style employment laws. Thanks Rachel.

The only way out of this country’s problems is to cut the size of the state while encouraging business and enterprise. Yet what does Reeves do? She expands the reach of the state yet further, taxing people so much for sending their kids to private schools that they will be forced into the state sector, telling people what heating systems to install and what cars to drive, and building yet more breakfast clubs so that yet more families can delegate responsibility for feeding their kids to the government.

Perhaps that’s where the government teeth-cleaning classes will also take place. The mind boggles just what the state will decide to do next, paid for by the dwindling private sector.

And the biggest item of expenditure on Reeves’ money-no-object shopping splurge? A massive £22 billion into the NHS before any indication of reforms to boost productivity. Oh, and Reeves is “investing” more still into something called GB Energy, though appears to have no more idea than the rest of us what that latest government organisation is going to do for us, other than spend, spend, spend and employ more bureaucrats.

In an extraordinary re-writing of history, Reeves declared that Labour had three times “re-built our country” – in 1945, 1964 and 1997. She then announced that it was her job to do so again with the “worst economic inheritance of any government since the war.” Garbage.

She inherited low inflation, low unemployment and the highest growth in the G7. Yet, as always, Labour is set to squander it all pursuing the fairy tale that you can tax, borrow and spend your way to a better future.

You can’t. It won’t happen. It never does. It always leads to disaster. Once again, the British people will pay the price for a Labour government.