To say this wasn’t the plan is an understatement.

When Rachel Reeves said last year (and many times since) that she had no intention of coming back to the British people with yet more tax rises, she meant it.

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But now the question ahead of the budget later this month is not so much whether taxes will rise, but which taxes, and by how much? Indeed, there’s growing speculation that the chancellor will be forced to break her manifesto pledge not to raise the rates of income tax, national insurance or VAT.

Her argument, made in her news conference on Tuesday morning, is that she is in this position in large part because of other people’s mistakes, primarily those of the Conservative Party.

But while it’s certainly true that a significant chunk of the likely downgrade to her fiscal position reflects the fact that the “trend growth rate” – the average speed of productivity growth – has dropped in recent years due to all sorts of issues, including Brexit, COVID-19 and the state of the labour market, she certainly bears some responsibility.

A problem that is some of her own making

First off, she established the fiscal rules against which she is being marked by the Office for Budget Responsibility.

Second, she decided to leave herself only a wafer-thin margin against those rules.

Third, even if it weren’t for the OBR’s productivity downgrade, it’s quite likely the chancellor would have broken those fiscal rules, due to the various U-turns by the government on welfare reforms, winter fuel, and extra giveaways they haven’t yet provided the funding for, such as reversing the two-child benefit cap.

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Now, at this stage, no one, save for the Treasury and the Office for Budget Responsibility, really knows the scale of the task facing the chancellor. And in the coming weeks, those numbers could change significantly.

But it’s becoming increasingly clear, from the political signalling if nothing else, that the government is rolling the pitch for bad news later this month.

Indeed, for all that this government pledged to bring an end to austerity, a combination of higher taxes and lower spending will be highly unpopular, not to mention deeply controversial. And while the chancellor will seek to blame her predecessors, it remains to be seen whether the public will be entirely convinced.

Axel Rudakubana’s brother feared he would kill a family member two years before the Southport attack, an inquiry has heard.

Dion Rudakubana, who is two years older than his brother, said Axel has a “short temper” and was prone to “violent outbursts”, hitting him regularly when they were children.

He said Axel’s behaviour escalated after he was expelled from the Range High School in Formby, Merseyside, in 2019 and their parents had “lost control”.

The public inquiry into the Southport attack heard by the time he left for university in 2022, Dion feared his brother would kill a family member.

In messages sent to a friend when he returned to the family home for Christmas, Dion said: “My brother doesn’t show mercy, my dad just has to try not to die… We hide knives to mitigate that factor.”

He told the inquiry there were times the police would be called out and recalled one incident when “my father was holding my brother off”.

“I remember being scared somebody was going to die… my dad,” he says.

Rudakubana was 17 when he murdered Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven, Bebe King, six, and Alice da Silva Aguiar, nine, in a knife attack on a Taylor Swift-themed dance class on July 29 last year.

Eight other children, who cannot be identified because of their age, were also injured, along with yoga instructor Leanne Lucas, who was leading the dance class, and businessman John Hayes, who was one of the first people on the scene and tackled the killer.

Giving evidence from a remote location by video-link, Dion’s voice could be heard but he could not be seen at Liverpool Town Hall.

After swearing on the Bible, he told how he and his brother grew up in Cardiff after their parents Laetitia Muzayire and Alphonse Rudakubana came to the UK from Rwanda and were granted asylum.

Dion says the genocide had a “very heavy influence on them” but he doesn’t feel he was “traumatised” by his parents’ experiences.

His mother and father studied for degrees and moved to Southport in 2013 because his mother got a job, while his father started working as taxi driver because “he was not finding work in the area he studied in”, Dion said.

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He told how Axel was resentful of him after they had to move schools because of his health issues.

Dion said Axel was physically bigger, and he felt “increasingly wary” of his younger brother who would regularly hit him and smash plates and glasses in their home.

Dion said the last interaction he had with his brother was in the summer of 2023, when Axel threw a metal bottle at him, but luckily he had already closed the door.

In his witness statement, Dion compared his brother with the “sociopath” played by Javier Bardem in No Country For Old Men, who kills ten people over the course of the film.

“I watched it recently and it concerned me,” he told the inquiry, which continues on Wednesday.