Rachel Reeves' budget speech was a vacuous re-presentation of what she had said during the general election campaign, mixed with arrogant smugness, meaningless rhetoric and a total absence of narrative or ideas. I wish there was something good to note in all this, but before she celebrates being the first woman Chancellor of the Exchequer shouldn't she prove she is up to the job?
The audio version of this video is here:
This is the transcript:
Rachel Reeves really is clueless. I wish I didn't have to say that. I would much rather be positive about what she had to say at the Labour Party conference, and I am recording this shortly after she sat down, but I cannot offer any other alternative brief summary of what she had to say.
Forty minutes of my life was spent watching her repeat the same line, time after time, about what she believed in and, at the end of it, I have no idea what she believes in, except perhaps three things.
One is that Rachel Reeves is very clever. She clearly believes in that. She's intensely smug. If you have the opportunity to see her smile at the start of the speech, you will understand what I mean.
And she is smug – okay - perhaps for a reason, because she is the first ever woman Chancellor of the Exchequer in the history of this country. But it would be great if, and this is my second point, she had something to offer in that post. But she hasn't.
When you listen to what she had to say, it was the same stump speech that she was putting out during the Labour election campaign. There was nothing new that she said today.
Okay, some people are making the point that she might have announced a little iteration of Labour's thinking on how they are going to recover money from those companies who might have got it fraudulently during the Covid era. But that apart, and maybe a minor tweak on the resources that she is going to supply to HM Revenue and Customs to recover tax, which are, by the way, vastly inadequate in relation to the need, those two things apart, she added nothing to what we knew before the general election.
She made the same claims about taxation - about what she's not going to increase.
She made the same point that everything she can do is dependent upon growth in the private sector of the economy, and there are no signs that that is going to happen.
She said nothing about climate change of any consequence.
She talked repeatedly about Labour's commitment to business and to workers and she did, as happened before the general election, ignore everyone else who lives in this country: children, pensioners, carers, non-business organisations, whether they be charities or NGOs, or state departments and the NHS, and the people who work in them. All of those people were ignored. She only has this incredibly blinkered view of politics, which is all about the idea that it is business versus workers. It's as if her politics was created in the 19th century, and she hasn't moved on since then. Which looks to be true.
What was the third problem with her speech?
Look if you dare at some of the cutaways during the speech when the camera panned across the audience. You will see people looking bored. After 20 minutes, I was praying for this to end, because it was clear that we were going to learn nothing. And the audience looked as though they felt the same way. This was a Chancellor speaking without a story, in other words. A Chancellor who can't tell us how all the promises that she made are going to be fulfilled except from growth over which she has precisely no control given the offer that she is making.
This is a Chancellor who says there will be no austerity and I believe her because she'll call it something else. Fiscal rectitude is my best bet.
This is a chancellor who says that there will be no cuts. And yet, almost immediately after she sat down, Darren Jones, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, was being interviewed by the BBC and he was talking about the meetings he will have with the department heads of every ministry in the government about the budgets that are going to be allocated to them. And everyone knew that what he was talking about was the constraints that will be imposed upon them.
This is a Chancellor who simply failed to explain what she will do.
I watched Keir Starmer looking at her, and at him giving her the due applause that is appropriate in these situations, sometimes even leading the standing ovations which she got from time to time, although why, it was hard to tell. But deep down, I wondered what he was really thinking. Was it, how long can she stay in this job and do nothing of any consequence?
Because, so far, all she's managed to do is make announcements on pensions which have alienated vast numbers of people and accepted a donation of £8,000 for her clothing, which she mis declared, let's be blunt, when she first put it into the Parliamentary Register of Interests by claiming it was for office costs.
Rachel Reeves has broken the glass ceiling. She has become the first Labour Chancellor in 14 years and the first woman Chancellor in 800 years. Those points have to be recorded. They are not what I'm interested in though. I don't care who is Chancellor for Labour, at least not this type of Labour Party, which is so clearly interested inserving the interests of business before it even serves the interests of workers.
What I'm interested in is what she's going to deliver. And so far, I have no idea. This speech added nothing at all to our understanding.
And that's why I think I can fairly say Rachel Reeves is clueless. I spent 40 minutes watching this speech, and they're 40 minutes I won't get back again. And frankly, they were wasted.
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I agree that it was a complete waste of time.
And soooooo Neo-liberal! – we have Sunak as an Asian prime minister, Reeves as a female chancellor – all prima facie to be applauded.
We get a sense of ‘progress’ when in fact the substance is just the same bullshit.
The race and gender points are just sugar coatings on the bitter pills we will be made to swallow.
I wish it was a “bitter pill” we were being asked to swallow, it may taste awful but you will feel better in the morning.
I fear we are being asked to take poison on the principle that what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. We know that mostly it just leaves us disabled and the lucky ones don’t wake up in the morning.
Thank you and well said, PSR.
After Obama’s, as it turned out to be, false “hope and change” in 2008, readers may be interested in the latest version, https://unherd.com/2024/09/kamala-harris-is-a-neocon-in-disguise/.
Reeves is both an economic ignoramus – what I previously described as a flat-earther economist = people who have overlooked the Copernican revolution brought about by the Great Financial Crash of 2008/9 which conclusively demonstrated what nonsense Neoliberal economics is – untrue, unworkable (except for the rich) hocus pocus – and a political thug (also posted previously in Reeves skewered
https://twitter.com/JackMonaghan1/status/1593265355253846017?t=xIwOt6uraSRupVq3khSDqA&s=07) but is more than adequately demonstrating the accuracy of my description of Starmer’s Cabinet (and most of the GE 2024 intake, old as well as new) as a bunch of Keystone Kops 4th-raters.
This isn’t death by a thousand cuts (that will come later, in whatever form their neo-austerity is clothed), but a reprise of what Dennis Healey said of – I think – Sir Geoffrey Howe as Chancellor – “being savaged by a dead sheep”!!
Decidedly also T. S Eliot’s.”not with a bang, but a whimper” – that is, if Starmer and his gang are lucky, and the sheeple don’t rise up in righteous indication against such a sorry apology for a Government and compel it to rediscover its Labour identity or leave office. It’s only my anger that stopd me from dying of boredom.
Agree it was 40 minutes wasted (and being bored out of one’s mind) but explaining clearly Reeves inadequacy is very valuable for the general public to know, if they have not already twigged how useless and even dangerously arrogant she is.
The video is going ballistic
Talk about self-punishment Richard.
I wouldnt have dreamed of watching it for all the reasons you say – she wasn’t going to say anything much beyond the election script .
But you and most of your commenters know she has to start investing in the NHS and other public services right now, not only to rescue them from final collapse, but also to have any chance of inducing growth.
That is a U-turn. She will u-turn, but she will say shes not u turning, although I think there have been hints that her fiscal rule might be tweaked to redefine ‘spending’ and ‘investment’..
Mazzucato , IPPR etc were at the conference fringe – banging the drum for public investment and Starmer is supposed to have adopted some of her ideas for ‘mission oriented’ government’….(really?).
So it is of interest to see if she can avoid the crash while pretending she didnt have to grab teh steering wheel.
As I read it, Mazzucato’s ‘mission’ based approach was intended as a bottom up locally generated and sustained approach to increasing participation in new public investment projects.
The implementation of this would be co-ordinated by local elected groups of whatever constitution with local partnerships with enterprises, and links for sub-regional programmes.
However, Labour have taken this and remoulded it into a top down, centrally directed and controlled set of ‘initiatives’, driven by some star chamber or other.
Al the Starmerites appear to be very much centralised authoritarian technocrats, with barely a vision between them, let alone an ethical foundation.
They are tinkerers.
Following neoliberalism is their line of least resistance. After all, the don’t want Andrew Bailey marshalling pitchforked financiers to show them whose boss.
“Missions’ in this form bear no relationship to Mazzucato’s innovation proposals.
Just a gimmick.
She deserves much better, though I did find that her mission based proposals left a number of questions airborne, and was a little thin walled in places in evaluating innovation.
I get the sense that Marianna Mazzucato is trying to out as much distance as she can between herself and Labour now
I agree.
“Where’s the beef?”
Thank you, Richard.
You watched it so I didn’t have to.
I will watch Starmer for the same reason
As a historian I’m usually very leery about ‘counter-factals’ as a means of assessing aspects of the past – more conversational game than genuinely illuminating. However, ther is, for a few more hours, a interesting ‘pre-factual’ in today’s Grauniad. After Reeves’ speech and before Starmer’s it will be interesting and perhaps even slightly illuminating to read Owen Jones ‘alternative’ PM’s speech at https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/sep/24/keir-starmer-alternative-leaders-speech-britain-conference
I have one coming later this week
Rachel Reeves has been advocating cutting the Winter Fuel Allowance for over ten years now:-
https://x.com/DickMackintosh/status/1838116188997480760?t=SQ1SUJ11LRwWMoHzPssCUw
That’s ten years to work out a fair way to do this. That she’s failed to do this and created a furore about it simply reveals a dreadfully incompetent politician. The Labour Party if it has any internal democracy, commonsense and commonsense left needs to dump her as soon as possible!
“commonsense and morality”
I wish the USA and UK would study how Germany became am economic powerhouse in the 1980’s and 1990’s. It was all due a tight working bond between the Government, Industry and Labor Unions. There is (was???) no underground economy.
If Industry needed nurses and mechanical engineers then, anybody qualified to study nursing and engineering study for free. If the government needed teachers then, anybody qualified to study education study for free
I have a friend who tried to set up what in the USA & UK is an LLC for the purpose of consulting work and it was basically impossible because Germany does not want “ghost companies” whose activity cannot be properly and easily tracked.
There is a serious underground economy now – likely to be bigger than in the UK based on VAT gap data, which I know werll as I have been employed by the EU to reveiw it in the past.
@Richard
Thanks for the update.
My German friend tried to set-up this German company three years ago.
People like Mazzucato, IPPR and Miata Fanbullah must be tearing their hair out – or just getting plain angry. Reeves is totally ignoring everything they’ve been saying to Labour for the last few years, and what people expected from them.
I am avoiding listening to news items about the Government on the grounds that I could be doing something more useful and rewarding. So it might be digging up cocksfoot or brushing up leaves, but its vastly more therapeutic! Oh and also writing up a blog for my website – a good read for all!
They’re all part of the Liz Truss school of economics.
Polly Toynbee was apparently listening to a different speech by Rachel Reeves.
mm…Polly had lost the plot in my estimation before I ceased to read the Guardian regularly more than a decade ago.
Just heard Wes Streeting (on R4 Political Thinking) say Reeves is the greatest Chancellor the Exchequer we’ve ever had. Oh dear. Why is his assessment so different from yours?
I think you know the answer to that