If Rachel Reeves were Conservative she'd have been turfed out long ago
Why is Rachel Reeves not sacked? Who will rid us of this clueless Chancellor? Whatever face-saving, backside-covering blather Reeves comes up with in her Spring Statement – 'Please, Sir, s'not me, it's that nasty Orange Man wot dun it!' – it is a fact that Rachel from Accounts has crashed the economy and tipped us into Reevescession. She did the exact opposite of what she promised. Rachel's October Budget was to growth what paraquat is to a putting green. Green shoots died, the earth was scorched; pain stopped play.
With remarkably convenient timing, the Governor of the Bank of England, Andrew Bailey, popped up on Monday to warn that Labour's hopes for growth have been dealt a blow and it is tariffs and an ageing population that pose major threats to the economy. Well, tariffs haven't started yet, Trump has only been President since January, and our older generation have spent their whole lives putting into the pot, rarely claimed benefits or taken a day off sick, yet suddenly they are the problem? Nothing to do with Rachel's gargantuan tax on business and mind-blowing fiscal ineptitude – are you quite sure, Andrew?
Many of our ageing population are now retired, but often providing childcare for the grandchildren so their parents can work and pay taxes. Meanwhile, the UK has been squandering up to £8 million a day housing illegal migrants, who pose a danger to our young women, and a deafening £7.5 billion a year on benefits for households containing foreign-born claimants.
(Oddly enough, I see tax receipts were almost exactly that amount, £7.7 billion, below forecast for the first 10 months of the past financial year.) If Rachel was giving the matter her full attention, instead of scrounging free £600 VIP concert tickets and rewriting her comic novel of a CV, then we might not have got into this frightening mess.
Back in the autumn, Reeves was full of herself, expensively made up on her first Budget Day; the class nerd who finally gets to bask in the popular girl's attention. She was 'deeply proud' to be the first female Chancellor, saying it showed girls and women there should be 'no ceiling on our ambitions'. What it actually showed was that over-promoting a woman who's not up to the job just because it looks good for Labour to have a woman in the role can badly backfire when that job happens to be stewardship of the world's sixth-largest economy. How far we've fallen from the leadership of Margaret Thatcher, who could not have been less interested in being a woman prime minister, and was only concerned to be the best at the job. I paid tribute to the Iron Lady at the Freedom Festival at the University of Buckingham over the weekend, wearing a Mrs Thatcher pussy-bow tribute dress. What else?
The all-powerful bond markets, who decide how creditworthy we are, weren't fooled by Rachel Reeves. They know an incompetent, taxtastic ninny when they see one.
The markets don't trust Rachel (she's also the least popular politician among Labour members). As a result, the cost of government borrowing shot up and is now consistently higher than at the peak of the panic over Liz Truss's mini budget.
Put it this way, if Rachel Reeves were a Conservative, she would have been turfed out of Number 11 months ago, hung, drawn and quartered, and Labour's media attack dogs would be feasting on her innards. Remember with what summary ruthlessness they took down Truss.
Hark to that clamour from major figures calling for the useless Reeves to go, the drumbeat of doom on the BBC News at Ten as Chris Mason, startled marsupial look, specs jumping with excitement on his nose, reports on mutinous MPs threatening to jump ship if Rachel doesn't walk the plank while Faisal Islam intones solemnly that 'concerns are growing at the Bank of England about the Chancellor's performance'.
What's that, you haven't heard the clamour? Perhaps because there hasn't been any. No outrage as hiring rates plunge. No blaming of the Chancellor by the Governor when thousands of the wealthy give up and move abroad. No major media outlets calling for Rachel Reeves's head despite the fact her fiscal projections are based on a rising tax take that is now more likely to go down after the kicking she gave employers. Thousands of businesses have closed since Labour took power eight months ago and a lot more will be shutting up shop from April 6 when Rachel's job tax kicks in. The complicit silence is extraordinary when you think of the nation-wrecking Horlicks she has made of things.
The contrast with the way Liz Truss was treated is shocking, I think. On Tuesday I asked the former prime minister for her take and she didn't hold back: 'Reeves is a creature of the failing British economic establishment and their patsies in the media who believe in high tax, net zero, high migration orthodoxy. When I tried to take them on and get the country out of the hole it was in I faced a relentless campaign that made it impossible to deliver – I was essentially threatened with the country's debt being defunded. The situation is far worse now – higher gilt rates and lower growth, but there is not a peep from the establishment.'
That might sound like sour grapes from our short-lived former prime minister, but Truss is right. The situation today is far worse than the one that brought her down. It is hard to explain just how dreadful things are since Reeves got behind the wheel with her L-plates, but the people who should be explaining don't even try. Mainly because, as Truss indicates, most of the establishment are very happy with a Labour government, even one as scary as this. Admittedly, things weren't all that clever when the Tories left office, but at least the economy was heading in the right direction. Today, our country is paying over £100 billion a year in interest on our debt. Brace yourselves, chaps. That's a hundred thousand million pounds of our national wealth – which could be spent on hospitals, social care, Covid catch-up for struggling schoolchildren and top-notch, properly-equipped Armed Forces – being used to keep the loan sharks at bay.
When she moved into Downing Street, Rachel Reeves introduced her 'securonomics' (the innumerate love-child of Gordon Brown's Prudence and Joe Biden). She removed the portrait of Nigel Lawson from the Chancellor's office and replaced it with one of a female communist. Nigel's son Dominic drily pointed out in his Daily Mail column that his father 'would have been much happier not to have his image in the Chancellor's study gazing helplessly over her as she proceeded to bring in policies which, far from being 'the most business-friendly ever', are doing dreadful damage to all the things he worked so hard to promote'. Britain can only dream of an economy as robust as the one Nigel Lawson left us.
Far from putting the public finances on a sound footing, as she likes to boast, Rachel's 'securonomics' are causing massive insecurity. The Chancellor has zero clue about life in the real world, where the effects of a 'Reevescession' are causing sleepless nights. A friend who runs a taxi company says the last quarter was poor and this one looks to be even worse; his order book, which should be filling up nicely through the autumn and into Christmas, is empty. 'Never known it so bad. What's the point? Might just sell up and go and live in Spain.'
You boast, dear Chancellor, about giving people on the national living wage a £1,400 pay rise, but which business owner do you think is going to take the risk of giving them a job? Not only are employer National Insurance contributions going to rocket next month, but thanks to the Employment Rights Bill, which is about to become law, a new staff member can call in sick from day one, get paid leave and, however useless they may be, are even harder to dismiss than… well, Rachel Reeves.
In her Spring Statement on Wednesday, the Chancellor won't dare raise taxes again; instead, she is set to cut Civil Service running costs, losing 10,000 jobs and saving £2 billion a year. Sorry, such 'efficiencies' won't touch the sides of the problem. It's like the bar steward on the Titanic wondering whether to cut back on olives or crisps. The iceberg looms.
Meanwhile, Reeves apologists in the media frivolously fret over tiny tweaks, 'Is this the new austerity?' If we can afford to spend £3 billion a year housing migrants who broke into our country then we're not doing austerity right.
There is an answer. Abandon net zero, drill and frack like mad, make energy cheap, unleash the billions of barrels of North Sea oil and gas which enabled Nigel Lawson to supercharge the economic recovery of Thatcher's Britain. But that would mean reneging on an ideological commitment, so Labour will keep its conscience clean and let everyone get poorer instead.
I hate to say this, but it looks like we need a major financial crisis to focus minds and to give politicians the guts they need to make those tough decisions they keep talking about. Reeves isn't up to it. There's a reason the nickname 'Rachel from Accounts' has stuck. 'The world has changed,' she will tell Parliament, but it's her own boggling stupidity that created a need for this emergency budget. She should own her mistakes and stand down before the markets call for her head.
Rachel Reeves was 'deeply proud' to be the first female Chancellor, but what's the use of breaking the glass ceiling when the roof falls in on the heads of the British people?
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