When French General Bosquet watched the 600 men of the Light Brigade charge helplessly into the Russian heavy artillery at Balaclava he muttered ‘c’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre’. Well, history repeats first as tragedy then as farce. And so today, those words came to mind as I watched Rachel Reeves prepare to charge into the grapeshot offered by the House of Lord’s economic affairs committee. Only without the ‘c’est magnifique’ bit.
Perhaps Reeves’ plan is to bore the markets into submission: after all, the stock exchange can’t crash if everyone’s asleep
Behind the Chancellor sat a boy in a lanyard bearing the legend ‘work experience’. One got the sense that it almost would have been kinder to let him have a crack. Reeves began by answering a simple question about the nature of her growth plan by committing a variety of crimes against the good use of the English language. It was all ‘sorta’, ‘kinda’, ‘um’ and ‘er’. There were endless managerial platitudes; she spoke of ‘embedding stability,’ and hailed the ‘three pillars of our growth strategy’. It was as if, rather than marshalling the Bedouin, Lawrence of Arabia had instead done a lengthy stint at Deloitte.
‘Different eras require different growth strategies,’ she sagely informed their lordships when quizzed about her infamous fiscal rules. ‘We’ve sort of got these three pillars that we think about’, which was reassuring. Imagine a builder saying, ‘You’ve sort of got these walls keeping your roof on’.
As Reeves prevaricated and blustered away for the next couple of hours, relying on being as boring as possible in her answers which were simultaneously exceptionally long while relaying almost no useful information. Perhaps her plan is to bore the markets into submission: after all, the stock exchange can’t crash if everyone’s asleep.
One thing that did draw attention was the higher quality of questions compared to any Commons Committee. Lord Agnew asked about stablecoin and tokenised deposits. Lord Petitgas brought in the nuances between the Bank of England’s and the Office for Budget Responsibility’s GDP predictions. The 9th Baron Londesborough asked an apposite question about the productivity lag. Lord Londesborough, an entrepreneur and foreign affairs expert, is soon to be booted out of the upper chamber by the government’s spiteful and philistinic ejection of the hereditary peers. Apparently he is less legitimate than the cadre of lobby chimps who normally sit behind Reeves in the lower house.
On the subject of which, back in the bug tank, Local Government Minister Jim McMahon was standing in for Big Ange on the question of Birmingham’s bins. McMahon has the delivery and rhetorical skill of a primary school child reading a book with chapters for the first time.
Plodding away through his notes, he kept on asking if questioners would ‘let him be clear’ before providing absolutely no clarity whatsoever. ‘C’était moronique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre,’ as General Bosquet might have said. Sometimes doing this job makes you question whether representative democracy was such a good idea after all.
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