Happy spring statement day, one and all. Today’s fiscal event – which is definitely NOT an ’emergency Budget’ – looks set to contain more gloom and doom about Rachel Reeves’ vanishing fiscal headroom. Looks like that £40bn October tax raid didn’t help much eh? So, with inflation still running high and the growth figures revised downward, it might be a good time for ministers to reassure the markets that Labour knows what it is doing in office.
Far from it. For Seema Malhotra, the minister for migration, this week took to X to illustrate her own economic credentials. She took aim at the last government, declaring that ‘Under the Tories’, there was ‘open borders, interest rates at 11 per cent, a £22 million blackhole and 14 years of failings.’ Of course, any politics obsessive knows that the actual Labour attack line is about the supposed ‘£22 billion blackhole’ – but who cares about the difference between a billion and a million eh?
Mr S might have been willing to overlook a minor typo. But Malhotra’s bigger mistake was in claiming that interest rates ever ran to 11 per cent under the last Tory government. Indeed, the last time the Bank of England’s Bank Rate hit double digits was before the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Feltham and Heston MP seems to have instead confused interest rates with inflation – with the UK briefly recording 11.1 per cent inflation in October 2022, in the aftermath of the pandemic.
So what did Malhotra do? Did she apologise and correct the record? Nope, she simply deleted the post without acknowledgement. Leadership at its finest.
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