Peter Rhodes on fighting wars, defining people - and what's behind the Chancellor's confident smile?

But on this momentous eve, my Budgetometer is swinging more to the grim. This began a few days ago when Chancellor Rachel Reeves announced that she was rewriting Britain's debt rules, thus releasing £50 billion that no-one knew we had. Her confident, slightly dazed smile reminded me of another smile. But whose was it? Reader, it was mine.

That was my confident, slightly dazed smile, way back in 1969 when I was fresh into the workplace with a weekly pay packet. The only snag was that everything was so damned expensive. And then a nice man at the garage introduced me to hire-purchase. That shiny new car, way out of my range at £900, was suddenly affordable on regular repayments.

I was on the verge of signing the paperwork when an old motoring correspondent did the sums and pointed out that the repayments on my £900 new car added up to the eye-watering sum of £1,400 and, that by the time I'd paid it off, the car would be worth no more than £500. Moral: there is no painless debt, no magic money tree. Whether it's my car loan or Ms Reeves' surprise £50 billion, it all has to be paid back. My smile endured for a few hours. I wonder how long hers will last.

I'm a tad worried, too, about Keir Starmer's latest definition of “working people” which now seems to exclude anyone with savings. So what's the difference between “working people” and “skint?”

Meanwhile, the defence secretary John Healey warns that (owing to 14 years of Tory mismanagement, naturally) our armed forces are not ready to fight a war. But then how does a civilised, progressive democracy, spending three per cent of GDP on defence and caring deeply for the lives of its soldiers, face up to a state run by a dictator like Putin who spends twice that amount and sees 70,000 war dead as a mere inconvenience? Are we prepared, financially, technically or psychologically, to become a war-ready nation? I doubt it.