Rachel Reeves is, as Labour frontbenchers go, pretty experienced. She’s not been in government, but then neither has her leader because there are now young teenagers who have never experienced a Labour government. Reeves has been on and off her party’s frontbench ever since she was elected in 2010, and that long experience was on show in her response this afternoon to the spring statement – in both good and bad ways.
This was one of the more confident responses I’ve watched from a Labour frontbencher to an economic statement over their 12 years of opposition. Reeves had a really clever section where she mocked the difference between Rishi Sunak’s reality and what life is like for everyone else by telling the tale of ‘Alice in Sunakland’, where ‘nothing here is quite as it seems’. She told the chamber:
In Sunakland, the Chancellor proclaims ‘I believe in lower taxes’, while at the same time hiking Alice’s National Insurance contributions. Alice asks the Chancellor: when did ‘lower’ taxes mean ‘higher’ taxes? Has ‘down’ really become the new ‘up’? … The Chancellor follows Humpty Dumpty’s advice and says ‘when I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less’.
This cost of living crisis is set to be far worse than the one Ed Miliband talked about when he was Labour leader
Reeves put a great deal of effort into defining the problems with Sunak, someone Labour fears as the most likely next Conservative leader. Her two main attacks were that he was out of touch and incompetent, unable to grasp quite how hard life is for many working families and ‘signing cheques to fradusters’ as part of the government’s Covid loans scheme. She also described him as ’Ted Heath with an Instagram account’, which probably won’t resonate with large sections of the electorate but will have stuck with many Tory MPs.
The problem with the picture she painted of Britain, though, is that it sounded so much like the complaints that Labour was making when she was on its frontbench a decade ago. That doesn’t mean that families aren’t struggling – they manifestly are: this cost of living crisis is set to be far worse than the one Ed Miliband talked about when he was Labour leader. It’s just that the repetition is a reminder of Labour’s failure to convince those struggling voters that it can do a better job than the party it blames for those hardships.
We saw this in the conclusion of the shadow chancellor’s speech, where she told MPs: ‘The Chancellor is making a historic mistake. Today was the day to scrap the tax rise on jobs. Today was the day to bring forward a windfall tax. Today was the day for the Chancellor to set out a plan to support British businesses.’ She complained that Sunak had ‘failed to appreciate the scale of the challenge that we face’, but Labour’s alternative also seems insignificant: the party makes repeated calls for a windfall tax and scrapping the National Instance rise. Keir Starmer has been trying to take Labour away from the destruction and strife of the Corbyn years, but his task is surely greater than just returning to the level of Ed Miliband’s achievements.
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