British Taxpayers Are Facing an Ugly Betrayal: Rosa Prince

The contents of a UK budget used to be confidential. So much so that a Labour chancellor of the exchequer, Hugh Dalton, felt obliged to resign in 1947 after letting slip a morsel to a friendly journalist while walking to the House of Commons. The juicy tidbits — a penny on beer, nothing on tobacco, horse racing spared but not betting on the dogs — caught the afternoon papers before he’d finished speaking to Parliament. He quit the next day.

Today’s Chancellor Rachel Reeves differs in a couple of important ways. She and her officials have been busily “rolling the ...