Will Keir Starmer really end up having to replace Rachel Reeves as Chancellor? This question seems to fly about every few weeks now, with the latest flurry following new allegations about her expenses claims while working at Halifax Bank of Scotland.
The Chancellor insisted on Friday afternoon that “no issues were ever raised” during her time working at the bank, that she was “never questioned, never asked to pay back any expenses”. She added: “In the end, people are going to judge me on the job that I’m doing now as Chancellor of the Exchequer to grow the economy and put more money in the pockets of working people.”
She’s right on the second point, though that doesn’t answer the question of whether Starmer might start to see his Chancellor as a political liability. What Reeves is doing now is not exactly endearing her to Cabinet colleagues or Labour backbenchers – and what she is likely to do in the next few weeks won’t make things any better either.
As well as breaking her own fiscal rules (which she had already tweaked to try to keep), Reeves will have to announce painful cuts to departmental spending which will set up endless fights and grievances within Government. The leaked Office for Budget Responsibility forecast this week suggested that Reeves is running out of fiscal headroom to make those spending cuts the last word, and that she may have to raise money through more taxes.
Reeves has taken the decision largely to brazen out the difficult time rather than try to rebuild her reputation or turn into a patronage machine like George Osborne did, wielding promises of promotions here and attractive funds to improve streets in constituencies there.
She has not managed to do nearly as much parliamentary outreach as senior colleagues think she should have done by this point, and while she has her loyalists, Reeves remains a reasonably distant figure for many Labour MPs.
Yes, she has tried to sound more upbeat about the British economy and the future, dropping her “we’re all doomed” narrative of the autumn. But she is still leaning into potential rows with Cabinet colleagues over aviation expansion vs net zero, with the unions over what will have to be lower pay settlements this year, and with military chiefs over whether to spend more on the Armed Forces, as the US insists that the time really has come for European countries to stop doing defence on the cheap.
Rachel Reeves is in a hole - she has no choice but to raise taxes
Read MoreShe is happy to have a fight over planning reform, painting in primary colours a standoff between “bats and newts” and the people who need a home they can afford.
Perhaps a willingness to have so many fights, including with the colleagues who Reeves needs to stay friendly with in order to retain her job and any future ambitions to be Labour leader is a sign of desperation. Or perhaps it is a sign she is just dogged enough to weather the kind of storms she knew would swirl around her as soon as she entered Government.
But even if a combination of missed (and self-imposed) fiscal rules, resentment from Government colleagues and questions about her pre-parliamentary career leave Reeves politically wounded, Starmer still doesn’t have a real reason to replace her as Chancellor. In fact, in many ways, he benefits from having a colleague who acts as a lightning rod for MPs’ angst about how the relatively new Labour Government is faring.
It is also not clear how getting in a new chancellor would quell that angst: it would in fact represent an enormous admission that the Government is on the wrong track.
Politicians could do with accepting that they’ve got things wrong a bit more than they do, but changing course so early in a government would undermine overall trust in that administration far more than any claims about Reeves’s taxi bills in a previous job.
Reeves’s problems are Starmer’s problems. Even if a new killer revelation about the Chancellor’s LinkedIn page did send her packing, those problems would stay right where they are: the economy is so anaemic that an “upturn” of 0.1 per cent is cause for relief, the fiscal headroom is about as cramped as the air left in a car that’s about to sink to the bottom of a lake, and the world is expensively unsafe.
The Prime Minister should probably be grateful that it’s Reeves taking the heat for all this: replacing her would make his life far more uncomfortable.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( Rachel Reeves’s plan is to be even more brazen )
Also on site :
- UnitedHealth Group CEO steps down; suspends 2025 outlook on higher-than-expected medical costs
- Kurdish leader Ocalan told the PKK to disband, it did: Here’s what to know
- New open world action-RPG Silver Palace is about playing detective and curb-stomping demons