As should be apparent to readers of this blog, I am no great fan of Rachael Reeves.
Chancellors are usually ranked on a scale, with a high point at 'indifferent' before reaching the depths of 'delivering positive harm'. Reeves most definitely heads towards the bottom end of that rating system, so dismally did she fail to grab the opportunities available to her because of her commitment to neoliberalism.
Despite that, as the FT notes this morning:
Despite the fact that Burnham is certain to be Prime Minister by next Monday, and the fact that it is near certain that Reeves will not be his pick for Chancellor, or maybe anything else, Reeves has not got the sense, good grace or basic political intelligence to postpone this event, which is essntially forward looking.
She will instead deliver a valedictory speech, claiming she has "left the economy in a good state for Burnham and that she has laid the foundations of trust and credibility."
Delusion does not come much larger than this. But let me indicate the scale of insignificance of her efforts.
She claimed to Laure Kuenssberg at the weekend that she will announce that:
The Treasury ... wants to help fill a gap between the SME demand for finance and the amount available of up to £4.1bn a year.
Reeves will announce an expansion of the British Business Bank's Growth Guarantee Scheme (GGS) that provides a 70 per cent government guarantee on commercial loans to SMEs of up to £2mn.
The Treasury said that since its launch in 2022, the scheme had delivered more than £3.7bn of financing to UK SMEs with £2.5bn of this reaching businesses outside of London and the south-east.
Let's put that in scale. Housing benefits, that go to the UK's landlords, will cost £37.3 billion this year.
The UK SME corporation tax gap is now at least £17 billion a year.
And Rachel Reeves wants to find an additional billion, maybe, for small businesses, which she says will drive growth, and it might, but not by anything like enough to make any noticeable difference.
That is what poverty of ambition looks like.
That is what failing to understand the brief looks like.
That is what talking about growth and failing to do anything to deliver it amounts to in practice.
Reeves has failed. It is time to move on. But I am not living in hope. I have few hopes for her successor, whoever they might be.
Thanks for reading this post.
You can share this post on social media of your choice by clicking these icons:
There are links to this blog's glossary in the above post that explain technical terms used in it. Follow them for more explanations.
You can subscribe to this blog's daily email here.
And if you would like to support this blog you can, here:
Buy me a coffee!
If a General Election was pending, then both Starmer and Reeves would be prevented from making major government announcements by the pre-election “purdah” period.
But in this new way of undemocratically changing PMs that we now favour in the UK, they have both been trying to influence_control/bind/embarrass their successors.
If they wanted to stay in power, they could have stood in a leadership contest.
Now that I understand this stuff better (thanks largely to you) I am equally lacking in hope. I will try another letter to my daily rag, to challenge them to tell us something other than the same old trite tripe. Other words came to mind, but it’s still breakfast time…
Total failure, thy name is Reeves. That said, it could not have been anything else. The woman is deluded and has always been. But her ideology fitted Starmers’ LINO & thus there we have it.
Her replacement will be no different, a know-nothing, do nothing ………without bankster approval. (It is entirely possible that she has enough self-awareness to recognise this – hence the interview & “look didn’t I do well” etc).
What can anyone say? Rachel Reeves is in a job well above her pay scale – whatever that might be! When commentators talk about her they tend to say how difficult it is to ‘balance the books’ either by raising taxes, cutting spending, or god forbid borrowing money from the market. As the commentators do not understand how governments are financed thats all they call talk about, made worse by asking someone like Paul Johnson or Jim O’Neil neither of whom understand either. Its all rather depressing! [I find it annoying that some people seem to think that people criticise Rachel Reeves because she is a woman but I think most of criticise her because like her male predecessors – she is useless!
And she cancelled what little infrastructure spending the South West had including the resilience works for the only mainline to Cornwall and took away our rural premium meaning massive cuts to Devon County Council and our NHS budgets. Not to mention the impact of the NI hike to jobs and hospitality businesses. We are literally much worse off than under the Tories and contrary to what people think there is significant poverty and deprivation in Devon and Cornwall,, especially Cornwall, but relatively few Labour votes to be won. Sadly Reform are doing well here.
She abandoned the Green New Deal before she even got near office!
Reeves has swallowed Thatherism whole sale.
Public bad; private good.
Giving money to the private sector and asking for it back via employment taxes however did not work, because the private sector does not like paying taxes. You only have to go on company’s house to see that. Thatcherism’s in built contradictions made raw for all to see.
As for housing, I’ve been getting a few prospectuses for supported housing coming into my email box. The offer is to ‘invest’ in a new unit, and then get a guaranteed 1% growth on returns a year (because the treasury will put up rents by at least that amount for you bless them) and leave the the management of the tenancies/unit to someone else (housing association/local authority) whilst you go to Spain or get your regular coffee at your local Costa and pat your back about how clever you have been. Currently, the government is funding grants to landlords to support tenants in tenancies – creating a market for these lets, that will essentially guarantee a return to private investors whilst elsewhere their citizens go hungry. So once again we have state policy as an opportunity for private rentierism. There are enough problems in housing going unsolved and now we have this which will distort an already malfunctioning market. And what happens when the sheen comes off and the grants dry up or the next new thing pops up? Someone has to pay somewhere for this stuff , but it is the state than can pay at the lowest cost and is denied the opportunity to do so time and time again so that others can make money out of what we need. No long term strategy, no vision just opportunism. Awful.
Much to agree with
Agreed. I also love ❤️ the renaming of Laura Kuenssberg to Laure. Adds a touch of class. Or should I say chic.
An error!