Rachel Reeves’s speech to Labour conference was very warmly received – though her thunder was rather stolen by the rapturous reception for Ed Miliband shortly before. The shadow chancellor made her refrain ‘it is time for a government that is on your side, and that government is a Labour government’.
Like her other frontbench colleagues, she took care to be upbeat about the future, rather than merely focusing on how dreadful things are at the moment. She talked about the potential that British workers had, saying: ‘The world is changing fast but the British capacity for enterprise for innovation and for hard work remains undimmed.’ She claimed that a Labour government would oversee ‘cranes going up, shovels in the ground, the sounds and sights of the future arriving’. Part of that vision was one of green jobs, with Reeves pledging she would be Britain’s ‘first green chancellor’.
She’s not the first to make that pledge, and neither was she the first to use the phrase ‘trickle down’. Her main attack on the Tories was that they had espoused trickle-down economics. This is not something those around Liz Truss recognise, saying that the phrase is only ever something the left use. That’s all well and good, but they don’t have their own catchy phrase to describe what they’re up to and so Reeves and her comrades are getting on with doing the branding themselves.
Reeves only spent a few sentences of the speech talking about how disciplined she would be as a chancellor. She did say that ‘Labour will not waver in our commitment to fiscal responsibility’ and that every line in the manifesto would be ‘carefully costed and fully funded’.
It’s something her frontbench colleagues have been keen to promote, saying it’s hard to get spending commitments through her shadow Treasury team and that everything has to be properly costed before the press releases get drafted. That was one of the key reasons why Labour had a bit of a pause before announcing its energy bill freeze funded by a windfall tax idea in the summer.
But Reeves clearly felt the discipline message had got through. She does, though, have to explain how she would fund other spending priorities given she only pledged to bring back the 45p tax rate, keeping other tax cuts announced by Kwasi Kwarteng last week. As Reeves knows, the Tories tend to get away with uncosted spending pledges to an extent that Labour can only dream of – and the upbeat mood of her speech and of the conference in general won’t have changed that.
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