Is this really Labour’s vision?

£9.93 billion sounds like, and is, an awful lot of money, but the British state spends nearly £1 trillion a year, and 2029/30 is five years away. It means that reality £9.93 billion is an absolutely tiny margin of error. If the forecasts are even a tiny bit off, or anything goes even a little bit awry, Reeves’s plans will have to change again.

The seemingly reassuring precision is essentially false hope: it is like a builder telling you that your extension will be finished not in December, or even on December 21, but at precisely 11:37am on December 21. It sounds reassuring, until you stop to think about it – and once you have, it just sounds implausible.

Reeves went to extraordinary lengths to make her spreadsheet output the correct figures, though – the outcome might be technical, but the actions required to get there were not. One striking trick she has used to get the number she wants is pocketing some of the cash from cutting foreign aid.

The government told the country, and its own MPs, that it was cutting foreign aid so that it could spend more on defence. Thanks to a clever-clever accounting trick, it isn’t quite doing that. Most government spending comes from the “current account”, which works like a normal current account – it is for recurring costs, the government equivalent of bills.

Investment in new equipment, buildings, or infrastructure comes from a separate “capital account”. Because so much defence spending is on equipment, it can – unlike foreign aid – come from the capital account. Thanks to this, Reeves sneakily slipped out the news yesterday that she’s just going to pocket a lot of the cash from the foreign aid budget to help balance the books. The idea that the foreign aid raid was money vitally needed for the defence of the realm and of Europe, it turns out, was just spin.

But even this is dwarfed by what Labour is doing on welfare. Keir Starmer, Reeves and the rest of the cabinet have repeatedly and piously argued that welfare reform is a necessary and moral thing to do. Perhaps some of them even believe it.

However, it is undeniable that the process has been rushed so that it can deliver savings in time for this spring statement, so that Rachel Reeves can make the sums add up. When the Office for Budget Responsibility’s scoring of the government measures didn’t deliver the savings Reeves needed, she changed the plans again at the last minute. The government simply cannot pretend the plans weren’t shaped and timed in order to get Reeves through the spring statement.

These policies will make more than three million families £1,500 worse off by the end of this Labour government. More starkly, they will leave 50,000 more children living in poverty. No previous Labour government has ever ended its term with more children living in poverty than when it started. That is one hell of a record Reeves is looking to break.

The decision is so bizarre and so shocking that it is only slowly rippling out through Labour MPs, campaigners, and supporters. Many were already aghast and confused by the party’s refusal to scrap the two-child benefit cap – the single measure that would most quickly take the most children out of child poverty.

Now, instead of having an argument over how quickly they can scrap the cap and lift children out of poverty, they’re about to vote through welfare cuts that will impoverish tens of thousands more kids.

And in reality, the government has got almost nothing in return for the sacrifice it is demanding of the nation’s children. Rachel Reeves has restored her £9.93 billion of headroom, down to the second decimal place. But that’s like trying to build a model ship in the middle of an earthquake – just because everything is in the right place now doesn’t mean it’ll stay there.

In reality, just hours after Reeves finished the spring statement, Donald Trump announced 25% global tariffs on cars and car parts, saying that he would introduce more on pharmaceuticals soon, with a broader series of global tariffs still to come. Any of these alone would completely upend all of the assumptions upon which Reeves’ delicate calculations rely.

The sums, it turns out, are ephemeral. There is a very real chance that Rachel Reeves has agreed to sell out the soul of the Labour Party – and the futures of 50,000 children – to make a spreadsheet add up for five hours on a Wednesday afternoon.

Is that what she went into government for? Is that the purpose of the Labour Party? What is it that they’re actually trying to do, here? Perhaps Reeves, untroubled, isn’t asking herself any of these questions – but she should be in no doubt that they are on the minds of the people on the benches behind her.