Rachel Reeves is getting better and better as Shadow Chancellor. Mind you, her response to Jeremy Hunt’s Autumn Statement was the second one she’s had to produce in two months, given it was only in September that she was reacting to Kwasi Kwarteng’s mini-Budget. There was plenty to criticise and plenty of political attacks to launch. And she offered it all with a mix of cold fury and jokes.
Reeves framed her assessment of Hunt’s economic announcements using the famous Ronald Reagan question of whether people felt better off as a result of the government. She said voters would be asking: ‘Are me and my family better off with a Conservative government? – and the answer is “no”.’ Later, she channelled Sting and The Police when she changed the lyrics of ‘Every Breath You Take’ to ‘The Conservatives are costing you’.
She also likened the government to ‘pickpockets’ and the later series of Dallas, with ‘old cast members returning as if nothing has happened to keep the audience, but the truth is it has lost all credibility and everyone knows it is long past time that the series is cancelled.’ She described the statement as an ‘invoice for the economic carnage’ caused by the government.
These were memorable lines and Labour shouldn’t just congratulate itself on them and move on: some of them are worth repeating until Westminster gets bored of them and voters are picking up on them.
But what’s also increasingly important is that Labour bores everyone to tears with its own plans so that voters also have an idea of what they’d be backing if they did turn to Reeves’ party. Her offering here was that there needed to be a ‘serious long-term plan to get our economy growing again’ and a ‘fairer, greener, more dynamic economy’. That second line was a reminder of the Milibandism that is still running through the Labour party – something I wrote about in last week’s magazine.
Reeves’s vision of what those priorities would look like continued thus:
‘With a modern industrial strategy where government works hand in hand with business, properly fixing business rates so that small businesses and our high streets thrive again, fixing the holes in the government’s Brexit deal so that our businesses can trade on the global stage, and ensuring Britain is the best place in the world to start and grow a business.’
Labour is still fleshing out what that means, and we won’t get all the detail before the election anyway. But the measures that Hunt had announced weren’t a million miles away from what you’d expect from Labour in these circumstances anyway. Her attacks were not so much on what the Chancellor was doing now, as they were on what the Conservatives had done up to this point.
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