Is Rachel Reeves toast? Not according to her. The Chancellor delivered an aggressively self-confident statement about Labour’s spending plans this afternoon. Soberly dressed in maroon, she rattled through her speech like a garden shredder grinding up branches and reducing them to pale little woodchips. Anyone would think she was pondering a leadership bid. After listing her achievements since last July, she issued a warning to the doubters.
‘I will return in the autumn to deliver the Budget.’
She relied on a good deal of amateur magicianship to conceal her fibs and exaggerations. Last autumn she claimed that £6.5 billion could be raised by cracking down on tax evasion. But that’s only the start. The duckers and divers have multiplied vastly in recent months, it seems. She has now ordered HMRC to find 20 per cent more of these crooks whose unpaid tax bills will be worth £1 billion to the Treasury. ‘These figures have been verified by the OBR,’ she said. This is clearly a forecast. And yet she treated it like a recorded achievement. Even Rachel from accounts knows that a request for cash is not the same as an actual payment.
She did it again with reference to the chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, who will magically ‘reduce the costs of running government’ by 2030. This will save another £2 billion, she claimed. Just like that. Out of nowhere. This vague aspiration was inserted into her future audit as if it were money in the bank. Perhaps she imagines that no one will double-check her figures.
Labour’s born-again hawks will welcome her increases in defence spending. The coastal regions of Britain will soon be bristling with brand new warships and jet fighters. And to pay for all this shiny hardware, the overseas aid budget will fall to 0.3 per cent of GDP. A colossal reduction. And yet no one raised a peep of protest. Under David Cameron, the figure was 0.7 per cent and everyone howled that Britain was shirking its responsibilities.
Reeves made the military announcements like a chat-show host introducing the star prize. ‘A protected budget of £400 million within the Ministry of Defence,’ she enthused, that will ‘bring innovative technology to the front line at speed’. But we needn’t imagine that all our money will be spent on guns and bullets. She promised a ‘a new defence growth board’ (whose aims are unstated, and whose budget is unknown), which will doubtless soak up plenty of cash in return for very little.
She turned to the thorny issue of long-term sickness. Every day in Starmer’s Britain, 1,000 more people register as disabled. Each of them wants benefits, of course, and many will have a sibling or neighbour ready to claim carer’s allowance too. ‘We’re writing off an entire generation,’ said Reeves in a voice of triumph. But she wasn’t boasting. Just the opposite. ‘We will not stand for it,’ she yelled. ‘It is a waste of their futures. And we will change it.’ But how? With a £400 million fund for Job Centres, she declared. Sceptics will tell you that Job Centres merely duplicate the work of employment agencies, and they do so far more slowly and more expensively. In addition, Reeves announced ‘guaranteed personalised employment support’ which will cost a further £1 billion. She didn’t explain why ‘employment support’ is so effective. Private firms seem to cope without it. And if it works, why limit the budget to £1 billion? If she spent five times more, the country would feel the benefit five times sooner.
It wasn’t all bad news. Reeves delivered a boost for landowners and anyone who loves sky-high property prices. Labour’s plan to build 1.5 million new homes by 2030 has been effectively scrapped. Specifically, she declared that the target will be trimmed by 200,000 to just 1.3 million homes. The prices of these properties will rise commensurately, of course. Breaking such a crucial pledge may cause Labour candidates difficulty on the doorstep but Reeves is no stranger to slippery phrases. She expressed the betrayal carefully. ‘[This is] within touching distance of our manifesto promise,’ she said. If she gets the boot from Number Eleven, she has a golden future as a fraudster.
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