The Chancellor highlighted £15bn for new transport infrastructure across the north and midlands of England in a speech on Wednesday, saying there is “more to come” in the spending review next Wednesday when she will reveal how £600bn of annual spending will be split between departments for the next three years. She also said more pensioners will get their winter fuel allowance this winter.
“Contrary to some conventional wisdom, I didn’t come into politics because I care passionately about fiscal rules,” Reeves argued. “I came into politics because I want to make a difference to the lives of working people.”
Paradoxically the Government is spending more overall. Big tax rises in the autumn have meant hefty cheques for public services, but because areas including health and defence are getting significant extra cash, there’s a tight squeeze on day-to-day spending more or less everywhere else.
“I have had to say no to things that I want to do,” Reeves added, warning that her Cabinet colleagues won’t “get everything they want” in the spending review next week.
The Government set out new fiscal rules in October last year, which say the budget should be on course to be in balance or surplus – and financial debt should fall as a share of the economy – by 2029-30. The rules also put constraints on welfare spending.
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On Monday, Starmer stood in front of workers at BAE in Glasgow to set out defence spending. He was flanked by a redheaded woman in a boiler suit with a fabulous blow-dry who paid close attention throughout. By contrast in Rochdale at Mellor, an accessible bus manufacturer, Reeves drew the short straw. Behind her was a grumpy-looking bloke who stared at his shoes and couldn’t hide his boredom at the Chancellor’s words. Perhaps he wasn’t interested in the Metrolink tram extension to Stockport town centre. At one point he gave her side-eye, with enormous meme potential.
“Fiscal rules are an indispensable safeguard for working people, and that is why my rules are non-negotiable,” she said. It’s ironic she was wheeling out the threat of a Truss-style meltdown when her popularity, according to the latest Ipsos poll, has declined to match that of her Tory predecessor, Kwasi Kwarteng, in the aftermath of that notorious event.
A Labour MP who has been campaigning in Scotland for the Hamilton Holyrood by-election said voters had been telling the party members knocking on their doors: “We’re Labour; why can’t you be more Labour too? That means higher tax of the wealthy and more spending.”
“The Tories shipped out the capacity of the Treasury to deal with social policy and it didn’t get into other departments; it disappeared. The worry in the PLP [Parliamentary Labour Party] is that social policy has felt siloed from all the other things we are trying to achieve so a focus on the fiscal rules is met with an eye roll because we are not looking at how fiscal and social policy interact,” the MP said.
Reeves’s spring statement was characterised by significant reductions to disability benefits. There’s no way she will want to go through that again. The Treasury is optimistic that the Chancellor’s expansive budgetary approach set out on Wednesday will be a defining feature of next week’s spending review.
But it’s a pivotal moment for Reeves as the allocation of Government resources will significantly influence the quality of public services and, consequently, voter satisfaction for the next few years. She doesn’t want her colleagues on the Labour benches to stare at their shoes and give her side-eye like the bus worker in Rochdale.
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