PIPS will soon be squeaking across the country as Jeremy Hunt, fairly and compassionately of course, tightened the economic squeeze on all of us, hiking taxes to their highest level since the Second World War.

As the Chancellor upped taxes and cut spending to the tune of £54bn, the OBR, the UK Government forecaster, calculated living standards would fall by 7% over the next two years; the biggest on record.

Labour’s Rachel Reeves accused Hunt of having “picked the pockets” of the entire country by deploying a “raft of stealth taxes” in his autumn statement.

The so-called “fiscal drag” will involve thresholds – covering the tax-free personal allowance, the higher income tax rate in England, National Insurance and inheritance tax – being frozen until April 2028.

Grimly, the OBR also said that we’re at the start of a year-long recession, that inflation would still be around 7% next year and, overall, the economy would shrink by 1.4% in 2023. Growth would return a year later but only by 1.3% and rise to 2.6% in 2025.

The forecaster noted how the amount of money we’re paying on debt interest was now, due to inflation, at its highest level since just after the war. Which means, barring the NHS, the UK is spending more money on debt interest than on any public service.

While there will be continued help with people’s energy bills from April, it will be less than before, so that average annual bills will rise £500 to hit £3,000; without Government assistance, they could have been north of £4,000.

As widely trailed, there was help for the most vulnerable. Pensioners and those on welfare will see their state pensions and benefits rise with inflation. There will also be one-off cost-of-living payments for the most vulnerable.

Given income tax is set for Scots by the Scottish Government, it will be interesting to see what it does with thresholds and rates as Nicola Sturgeon always makes the point that, overall, most people in Scotland pay less tax than in England.

Of course, the contrast between Hunt’s conventional approach and his predecessor Kwasi Kwarteng’s reckless splurge in raising borrowing to help fund £45bn in tax cuts on top of a massively expensive energy support package with no eye to what the financial markets would think or with an OBR analysis, could not have been starker.

With a grim OBR forecast, the replacement Chancellor calmly set out his array of tax hikes and spending cuts with the primary aim of reassuring investors Britain was intent on “paying our way” to balance the books; eventually.

It worked. The financial markets, having priced in the well-trailed measures, didn’t blink.

As ever, the fiscal statement was as much about politics as it was about economics.

The Chancellor lingered over the bits he wanted to stress like making the better off pay more tax, raising the minimum wage, higher spending on health and education – which will help provide a knock-on £1.5bn boost for the Scottish Government – and slapping an extended windfall levy on energy giants.

But he zipped over future real-terms departmental spending cuts, a rise in unemployment and the two-year delay to the cap on social care costs in England.

Procrastination may be the thief of time but by backloading public spending cuts until after the 2024 General Election the PM and Chancellor are hoping the initial painful measures, mainly on tax, will pay off to such a degree that the second instalment of unhappiness, the spending cuts, might not be as severe as initially thought.

In other words, the Conservatives’ hope is fiscal prudence will have shown they can once again be trusted to manage the economy.

Yet Labour’s election pitch will be to remind voters it was Tory recklessness that made the financial crisis much worse, pushing up people’s mortgages and rents, meaning they cannot be trusted to pull the UK through to recovery.

But if Starmer does end up in Downing Street, it’s been suggested his administration will be so heavily constrained economically, it will be caught in an economic “trap” set by the Tories.

At Westminster, another part of Sunak and Hunt’s delicate balancing act will be keeping their Tory colleagues on side. Already, bottoms have been shuffling uncomfortably on the Conservative benches.

Ex-Cabinet minister Esther McVey has warned she will not support tax rises without the scrapping of the “unnecessary vanity project” of HS2 – which Hunt made clear would go ahead – while Simon Clarke, who was in Truss’s Cabinet, warned Hunt not to “overcorrect” by imposing too many tax hikes.

One highly contentious issue for Tory MPs will be allowing councils in England to raise council tax by up to 5%, which won’t go down well with their constituents.

The UK Government has a working majority of 69 and so it would take 35 Tory rebels to scupper its Finance Bill. An unlikely prospect given it could trigger a general election; the last thing Conservatives want given Labour’s large poll lead.

Such is the tradition of fiscal statements being an exercise in the art of smoke and mirrors, that it may be the full story doesn’t emerge until the weekend after some eagle-eyed journalist or economist has spotted a footnote to paragraph 43, subsection 61, which tells us obliquely that we’re all going to have to pay even more for this and that.

So now the defining moment of the Sunak Government has occurred and the Tories’ strategy to what the PM hopes will be Britain’s recovery has been set. Yet neither he nor any of us knows if it will raise the country out of its deep hole of economic turmoil or accelerate us deeper towards another dead-end.

With the next election less than two years away, time is not on Sunak’s or the Conservatives’ side.

Liz Truss’s Black Friday followed 30 years almost to the day after John Major’s Black Wednesday. And we all know what that meant for the Tories electorally. As things stand, it’s hard to see history not repeating itself.