This is from last night's Mansion House Speech by Rachel Reeves:
I will always do what is in our national interest…
… for our economy…
… for our businesses…
… and for the British people.
That means free and open trade…
… especially with our most economically important partners.
That includes the United States…
… our single most important destination for financial services trade…
… and there is so much potential for us to deepen our economic relationship on areas such as emerging technologies.
I look forward to working closely with President-Elect Trump, and his team, to strengthen our relationship in the years ahead.
Naive optimism is not the best way of selling your policy to an audience that is well aware of the risks that Trump is currently threatening.
If Reeves were to have made sense, she would have talked about the threat of tariffs and how she will manage it, but she did not. I am not sure her audience will have been massively comforted by her naivete.
And she then went on to say we will never rejoin the EU. That must have also added to their comfort.
If she's going to claim to put the national interest first, she really should show how and not ignore the realities of the current world political-economic situation.
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When a minister says “we will never rejoin the EU” they don’t mean it is never going to happen in any circumstances. They really mean they don’t foresee it happening while they are in charge.
For what it is worth, I don’t foresee us rejoining the EU in this parliament or the next. We can certainly reach agreements to make the relationship between the UK and the EU closer, but rejoining would require a political groundswell of support for seeking membership (not just regret at leaving) and a party willing to stand for office on that platform and win a general election and likely a referendum.
So we will live for another decade or two with the economic and social damage that the ill-advised Brexit has caused. Just one terrible legacy of the previous 14 years of Tory led government.
I’m glad you’ve looked at her speech and not me.
This is truly awful.
Never rejoin the EU?
This is insanity.
Who is getting to her? Who is advising her? BREXIT is a busted flush.
And she is going to try to cosy up to Trump.
Darren Jones (Chief Secretary to the Treasury) was being profiled on R4 last week I think and he said tellingly that in politics you have to ‘accept life as you find it’.
Really? I thought that you needed a different outlook to that if you were promising change! There’s Labour’s problem, right there – they’d given up already.
Woeful.
The same bunch as Starmer prefers to Westminster, the globalist so called elite embodied in WEF at Davis, plus the others of the same ilk in the WHO.
I regard labour’s stance re the EU and the catastrophe that is Trump as prime examples of their political cowardice. Everyone except the most deranged Brexiters now accept Brexit is disaster, and we know Trump will provoke trade war, so the best way to protect the UK interests is seek to rejoin the EU ASAP.
Any trade treaty with Trump’s USA would be hopelessly one sided. And yet this lot now sound like the above mentioned Brexiters in their attitude to the EU and Trump. Why are labour so unwilling to stand up the shrieking lunatics of the right?
Weak, cowardly and next to useless. You’re right PSR, they have surrendered to the enemies of decency and sanity with barely a short being fired.
My dislike of Reeves and all she stands for is fast gaining on my dislike for Streeting. This current Labour Party is dead to me.
“Naive optimism ” – Reeves is deluded & given comments in a previous blog (yesterday) almost certainly out of her depth – “(wo)mans gotta know his limitations” quoting the man with no name – clearly Reeves is unfamiliar with hers.
Slightly off topic the recent appointment of a Russia/Putler apologist to head the NSA in the USA, raises the question of the relationship between the NSA and GCHQ (which gets circa £90m per year from the NSA).
I want to ask what is both a stupid but also a serious question.
Rachel Reeves (& every Commons Cabinet Minister) is a constituency MP.
Reeves has “fought” 7 General Election campaigns, winning the last 5.
How do politicians navigate this electoral process without encountering challenge for their total lack of understanding of the lives of ordinary people?
If Reeves came to our local community centre to do a speech (with at least one hour of unfiltered Q&A afterwards), with a council estate audience, from this seriously poverty-stricken (and getting worse) ward of S Bristol, would she have the slightest idea what to say?
If she can’t make a convincing speech on the economy to a City audience in the safety of the Mansion House (for her, the centre of the known universe), what hope would she have round here? (she can have a “rotten-tomato-proof” screen if she wants one).
Of course she couldn’t & wouldn’t do it. The idea is unthinkable, the great and the good don’t answer to the likes of us, and wouldn’t know how to. But doesn’t THAT (rather than the freebie dress allowance) make them unfit for public office?
Yet, going back to my 1st paragraph, she’s campaigned in SEVEN general elections and won 5. There is something VERY wrong with our democracy, and party organisation, and press, which can’t hold her to account or drill some street level reality into her PPE/Bank of England befuddled brain?
How do people driven by such ignorant nonsensical ill-informed drivel, end up in 11 or 10 Downing Street, year after year after year, representing the Single Transferable (“we can’t afford it”) Party?
We have to work out how, peacefully, to get these people out of power, and out of politics. Otherwise someone will soon start prising up cobblestones (which btw I do NOT endorse, so no need for Yvette Cooper to have me arrested for sedition).
The answer is simple
They do everything they can to avoid the public