26-03-2025
Battle-tank Reeves crushes the Tories – but her own side are yet to be steamrollered
There's something of a battle-tank about Rachel Reeves, so it was no surprise that she started her big day posting a picture of herself posing by an actual armoured car and flanked by soldiers in khaki.
Gears crunching, helmet hair rigid, the chancellor's verbal caterpillar tracks soon flattened another chunk of the welfare budget. 'Economic security is non-negotiable,' she intoned, Dalek-like. Exterminate!
Reeves' military imagery alluded to one of her key messages, which she repeated all day long, that 'the world is changing'. This is the Treasury 's latest excuse for the economy not growing in the way that Labour promised, but it also sounds uncomfortably similar to 'events, dear boy events', which was the answer famously given by Harold Macmillan when asked why governments lose elections.
For the morning media round, the defence secretary was wheeled out of his bunker. John Healey was a good choice, not just because he is getting all the cash hijacked from overseas aid, but also because he is about the only top rank minister who hasn't pocketed free family tickets to pop concerts.
Shortly before lunch, Reeves trundled from No 11 to the Commons wearing a huge smile – looking as though she had just won the lottery rather than been informed that her NI rise had caused the growth rate to halve. Some tanks have no reverse gear.
Taking her place at the dispatch box, she received a dutiful rather than ecstatic cheer from her own side. Labour MPs were going to make her work harder than usual.
At the back of the chamber, a Banquo-like Anneliese Dodds apparated at the fore of a crowd of standing MPs, just within the chancellor's eyeline. Wearing a baleful expression and dressed head to toe in black, Dodds, the sole senior minister to resign over the aid cuts, glared in reproachful silence. If Reeves spotted her, she gave no sign but ploughed on through her statement, red-painted fingernails marking her place in the treasury script.
The chancellor was kept occupied by the Tories, who adopted a strategy of laughing uproariously whenever she resorted to clichés, which was often. She took revenge by bringing up Liz Truss's disastrous mini-budget at every opportunity.
Sir Keir Starmer, next to her, listened with a slightly furrowed brow. Angela Rayner nodded enthusiastically –and was rewarded with a big sisterly credit for pushing through planning reforms that Reeves predicted will boost the economy just in time for the next election.
There was not much red meat to cheer Labour backbenchers. In the words of Sabrina Carpenter, the pop singer that Reeves took freebie family tickets to see recently: 'Oh, it's slim pickings.'
But with Reeves it's all about the politics – and her messaging was relentless. Britain would be 'a defence industrial superpower'. The parties opposite were opposing new homes and jobs. Labour was making a difference. She sat down to a bigger cheer than when she stood up.
Mel Stride, the Conservative shadow chancellor, spent much of the statement poring over graphs and tables from the Office for Budget Responsibility. There are few tougher tasks than replying to a spring statement – and his creased script bore visible proof of the herculean effort involved, the original typescript hidden behind scrawled annotations.
He called it 'an emergency budget', despite the absence of tax and spend changes, and attacked the welfare cuts while also saying his side would have gone 'much, much further'.
With an impressively straight face, he asserted that Reeves's tax rises had killed off a healthy growth rate inherited from the Tories. 'With her fingers crossed, she fiddled the figures,' Stride alleged, almost begging speaker Lindsay Hoyle to rebuke him.
Inflation, at under three per cent, was 'growing on her watch', went on Stride, which drew laughter from Labour MPs who recalled the dizzying 10 per cent rate under Liz Truss's watch.
Potentially more dangerous for the chancellor was the handful of Labour MPs who stood up to voice misgivings. Debbie Abrahams, chair of the work and pensions committee, warned of ' severe poverty ' and sickness due to welfare cuts.
Left-winger Richard Burgon questioned the 'easy option' of taking rather than 'the Labour option' of a wealth tax.
But the tank rumbled onwards. Later, the economic wonks of the IFS issued their own verdicts, making clear just how vulnerable the chancellor's numbers are to economic shocks.
One passage in Reeves' speech hinted at the precariousness of her position. 'The British people put their trust in this Labour government because they knew that we – they knew that I – would never take risks with the public finances.' The use of 'I' instead of 'we' indicated, rightly, that one woman will claim full credit if her economic plan works – and will be swiftly disposed of if it fails.
