Rachel Reeves is coming out fighting as she prepares to unveil billions in cuts

In recent months, the chancellor has become a lightning rod for criticism.

She been accused of ushering in a new era of austerity and channelling George Osborne with governments cuts to welfare, winter fuel and international aid.

She’s been described as a new Liz Truss, with her focus on growth and tearing up regulation.

She’s been urged to hike taxes for the wealthy by left-wing Labour MPs.

She’s been under pressure to loosen her self-imposed fiscal rules – even Lord Blunkett, the former Labour home secretary, has called on her to allow more government borrowing.

As for the Tories, they claim she’s facing a crisis of her own making after trash-talking the economy and damaging business confidence by hiking national insurance on employers.

But if the pressure is taking its toll on Rachel Reeves, it didn’t show this morning.

She breezed into the Sky News Westminster studio for her interview on Sunday Morning With Trevor Phillips and positively beamed when he asked about the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) preparing to slash its growth forecasts, reportedly by as much as half, and the severity of the country’s financial situation.

She insisted the “world has changed” since her October budget and said the government is responding through greater investment in defence and security.

The chancellor has clearly decided to come out fighting.

She’s wedded to her fiscal rules, she’s sticking to her promise not to cut taxes, and determinedly standing by the decisions she took in the October budget.

“I promised at the general election to bring stability back to the economy – and as a result of that stability, interest rates have been cut three times since the general election,” she said.

“That’s only been possible because we put our public finances on a firm footing, and we’ve also put our public services on a firm footing.”

There was no real acknowledgement that cuts in interest rates have now stalled and economic growth is flatlining.

She brushed off the prospect of a more negative outlook by deferring again and again to the as-yet-unpublished OBR forecast.

“I know that we need to go further and faster in delivering economic growth and seeing public services improve – but there are no shortcuts here,” she said. “It’s not possible within just a few months to reverse more than a decade of economic stagnation, but we are making the changes that are necessary to bring money into the economy.”

It’s clearly part of the chancellor’s job to talk up the economy they’re responsible for. But the strategy here was to show no hint of weakness.

The spring statement is already done and dusted as it had to be submitted to the OBR last week for its forecasts to be prepared and printed.

So there’s no way back now on the likely cuts to come.

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We’re expecting the chancellor to set out savings of around £10bn, including the £5bn of welfare savings announced last week.

Today she confirmed the civil service will be forced to cut £2bn a year by slashing administration costs by the end of the decade – although the savings will be used to protect frontline services from cutbacks.

She told me people who were describing the event as an emergency budget – which implies tax changes – are going to look “very silly” when they hear what she’s got to say on Wednesday.

That’s a dig at shadow chancellor Mel Stride and the Tories, who’ve been doing their best to make the “emergency budget” moniker stick.

Read more:
Spring statement – what you need to know
Benefits system changes explained

You’d think they might want to avoid reminding people of the last emergency budget, which was Jeremy Hunt’s effort to clean up the shrapnel left behind by Liz Truss’s mini budget implosion.

But for Rachel Reeves, it’s an ever-present reminder of what can go wrong.

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