THE media consensus is that Rachel Reeves faces “tough choices” in her Budget on Wednesday.

The economy stubbornly refuses to grow. Public services are on their knees. Councils are broke, the White House wants more military spending and she’s trapped by her vow to ensure debt falls relative to GDP.

So Reeves’s choices are to raise taxes (when she has promised not to raise income tax, employees’ National Insurance or VAT). Or cut spending, which undermines any prospect of improving services. The government lacks public trust, media sympathy or the confidence of its own back benches.

Labour cannot navigate this minefield without considering policies it has so far set its face against.

Two measures that now have broad agreement across the labour movement should be pressed on MPs.

One is borrowing more to invest in Britain’s dilapidated infrastructure and a green industrial revolution: Labour’s current fixation with attracting foreign investment will not pay off, since (as we have seen in sectors from rail to water) corporations are interested only in how much money they can leech out.

Another is a wealth tax. This is popular: while most British households have lost spending power over the last 15 years, the rich have accumulated wealth at a staggering rate.

The monopoly press scaremongers over the risk of wealthy individuals leaving Britain. This is absurd, since the rich are doing better than ever: Oxfam has found that the richest 1 per cent own more than the lower 70 per cent of the population.

The scaremongering depends on the myth that the very rich contribute disproportionally to national wellbeing: the opposite is true, since assets are taxed more lightly than incomes and wealth is hoarded while wages are spent.

We should answer that part of the rationale of a wealth tax is precisely to cut the rich down to size: this is not just about funding services but about reducing inequality and countering the pernicious influence of the very wealthy on our society and political system.

So a wealth tax is needed — but those arguing it will not rescue public services are right too.

The reason Britain’s economy doesn’t work for the working class lies deeper than tax policy. It is about ownership.

As RMT general secretary Eddie Dempsey has pointed out, spending relative to GDP is similar today to what it was before Thatcher, but now “nothing works — the issue is where the money goes.”

The state has outsourced most of its social functions — and transformed essential services into revenue streams for profiteers uninterested in the services themselves. The profiteer’s cut drives up the cost of NHS procedures, school maintenance, care homes, public transport, even prisons.

Having handed control over the bones of the economy to private capital, the state no longer has the clout to stand up to the bond markets whose disapproval terrifies politicians.

As the decision to freeze rail fares now firms are coming back into public ownership shows, nationalisation allows more leeway to act in the public interest. Reeves would do more for household budgets by nationalising water or energy than by tweaking tax rates.

Voices calling for redistributive taxation are welcome. But this must be one plank of a wider left-wing programme. Who owns Britain — the people or the boardrooms?

Tomorrow the People’s Assembly rallies at Downing Street to demand a people’s Budget.

Reeves will not listen. But public opinion is already on side — we need a means of translating that into political pressure.

A community-based movement, able to organise and confront politicians at local level and working hand in hand with the unions, can unite people around specific demands even if the left and the labour movement are not in agreement on supporting any one political party.

That was the mission of the People’s Assembly, when it took shape to battle Tory austerity. It is no less needed today.