Nobody should cheer that. But it’s not possible to ignore the reality that the Chancellor has made mistake after mistake, with little signal she’s discovered from any of them.
She tanked sentiment the second she took workplace, loudly claiming to have inherited the worst fiscal scenario since the Second World War. That reckless exaggeration spooked buyers and confirmed to the world that Britain was broke.
Then she banged on and on about that £22billion Tory “black hole” she someway missed, utilizing it to justify a string of punitive insurance policies.
Reeves then terrifed companies and customers with warnings of a tax onslaught 4 months down the line. When her £40billion Budget raid finally landed, it was even worse than feared.
The rise in employers’ national insurance coverage has already value 275,000 jobs. Her raid on inheritance tax reliefs for household corporations and farms is pure class conflict. The doomed non-dom crackdown is driving wealth overseas – leaving strange taxpayers to decide up the invoice.
Meanwhile, she threw money at public sector staff with inflation-busting pay rises, without demanding a single productiveness enchancment in return.
She’s destroyed her fiscal headroom not once, but twice.
All of that would be cause enough to go. But no – Reeves won’t resign over any of it. Because in right now’s Labour Party, that’s just another day at the workplace.
What’s pushed her to the brink is something else totally. She tried to do one of the few smart issues on her file, trim the ballooning invoice for working-age health-related advantages.
That invoice jumped from £36billion in 2019/20 to £52billion last 12 months. Without reform, it’ll hit £66billion by 2029/30, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies.
Reeves tried to claw back just £5billion via modest adjustments. Now she’ll be fortunate to save £5.50.
Why? Because her own social gathering won’t have it. Labour backbenchers, drunk on self-righteousness and financial ignorance, revolted. Cabinet grandees like Angela Rayner and Ed Miliband egged them on.
Reeves saw the numbers, saw the disaster coming, and tried to act. But the left-wing mob won. The invoice was gutted. She cried.
I’d have cried too, in her sneakers. Because if even this reform can’t get through, the nation’s funds are doomed.
For all her faults, Reeves is the only member of Labour’s frontbench who seems to grasp the scale of the menace.
But she’s completed now. The Left of her social gathering smells blood. They need more spending, more taxes, more fantasy. Reeves tried to maintain the line – and was crushed. Or rather, “clusterf*****”.
It’s surreal to write, but Reeves has become the only grown-up in a room full of spoiled kids. A Chancellor surrounded by MPs who’ve never met a pound they didn’t need to borrow, spend or tax.
Yes, the injury she’s accomplished with her tax raids is deep and lasting. But at least she tried, once, to apply a contact of fiscal self-discipline.
Her greatest mistake wasn’t coverage. It was trusting Keir Starmer to back her. He didn’t. As she crumbled in public, he just droned on about his own achievements.
The man has all the empathy of a callcentre chatbot. His coding had to be amended this morning, by aides determined to retain the pretence that he’s human.
Kemi Badenoch called her a “human shield”. She’s proper. Reeves was the barrier between Labour’s self-importance politics and financial actuality.
Starmer let her sink because he’s too cowardly to combat the factions in his own social gathering.
If Reeves actually believes in sound public funds, she should bounce ship now. Because nobody else in Labour does.
And her boss only thinks of himself.
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