A Cabinet minister has refused to say whether a small business owner earning ￡13,000 a year is a “working person” who should be protected from tax rises in Rachel Reeves’s first Budget.

       Bridget Phillipson, the Education Secretary, said Labour’s definition of a working person was someone “whose main income arises from the fact that they go out to work every day”.

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       She said this would apply to Cabinet ministers like her, who would “not see higher taxes” when they looked at their payslips after the Chancellor’s Budget on Wednesday.

       Asked if the same protections applied to small business owners who earn their income from profits, she refused to give any assurances, describing the question as “hypothetical”.

       Speaking on the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg programme, Ms Phillipson said: “We can go through a range of different hypotheticals about who may or may not be captured by tax measures that may or may not happen in the Budget.

       “I know it’s frustrating ahead of the Budget that I can talk about some areas, but not all of it. When Rachel is sat here next weekend you can ask her about the measures that she’s announced.”

       Ms Phillipson, who received free school meals growing up, also characterised Labour as the party of the working class.

       She said she suspected that “a number” of her colleagues in the Cabinet would say the same, noting that she was “proud” of her working roots.

       In an interview with Sky News on Sunday, it was put to Ms Phillipson that the Labour manifesto mentioned “working people” a total of 21 times, but included no reference to the phrase “working class”.

       Asked why Labour did not “want to be seen as the party of the working class anymore”, she told the Sunday Morning with Trevor Phillips show: “We are.”

       She added: “I’m proudly from a working class background, as are many of us in the Cabinet, very proud to be so.”

       Put to her that she was the first person to say that in the Sky News studio during the current series of its flagship Sunday politics programme, she said: “I don’t think I’d be the last if you asked a number of my colleagues in Cabinet.”

       Labour was traditionally seen as the party of the working class, having grown out of the trade union movement at the turn of the 20th century.

       However, its claim to this title has been challenged over the years by those who argue it has abandoned its working roots for the centre ground.

       Lord Prescott, who was deputy prime minister to Sir Tony Blair, the face of the New Labour movement, famously said in the run-up to the 1997 election that “we are all middle class now”.

       Last week, Lord Lamont claimed Labour’s pledge not to increase taxes on “working people” was “deliberately designed to imply working class”, which he labelled as an “out of date idea” appealing to “old fashioned Labour mythology”.

       The Tory former chancellor accused the party of engaging in a “class war”, telling GB News: “I think it is a very unpleasant term to talk about ‘working people’. Why is a pensioner not a working person? They have worked all of their life. It is ridiculous.”