This was a huge, change-making budget.
Don’t let anyone tell you there isn’t much difference between the main parties at Westminster.
This was a Budget with Labour’s instincts and worldview stamped throughout it.
There are the tax rises visible from near-earth orbit, the self imposed borrowing rules shredded and re-written – to allow more borrowing – and big wads of spending for the NHS, just for starters.
I lost track during the election campaign of how often Labour folk insisted they had “no plans” to put up taxes beyond a relatively narrow band of those they said would rise.
Looked at now you don’t have to be wildly uncharitable to conclude that was comprehensive baloney.
Labour, psychologically scarred by losing far more elections than they win, tend to try to hug the Conservatives close when it comes to tax and spending plans before elections where they think they can beat them, fearing anything else will spook swing voters and cost them the contest.
And, pretty much, that is what Labour did back in the summer.
No such caution now.
The books were worse than we thought is Labour’s mitigating plea, garnished with a we-won’t-do-it-again insistence from the chancellor in my interview with her.
“This is not the sort of Budget we would want to repeat,” Rachel Reeves told me.
For the chancellor, we now enter the valley of maximum scrutiny and jeopardy for her prospectus.
Journalists, policy experts, industry, trade unions, you as readers have a chance to properly squirrel away at the detail and ask awkward questions.
You will see the chancellor on television and hear her on the radio.
Senior figures insist they want to embrace this scrutiny.
They point out she didn’t go on TV and radio shows last Sunday, before the Budget, as has become recent infuriating tradition – where journalists ask pertinent questions about the content of the Budget and are repeatedly told to wait until Wednesday.
She will instead be appearing this Sunday, alongside the new Conservative leader elected on Saturday, no doubt.
So where might that scrutiny come? All the big stuff, for sure – the tax rises, the borrowing, the spending.
