A FEW days ago Britain’s Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, broke down in tears in the House of Commons. Commentary was of course immediate, and has covered a range of reactions. The Prime Minister, who was somewhat typically oblivious as the tears fell, claimed that in the excitement and clash of Commons debate it was all too easy not to notice his supposed senior economic guide sobbing beside him.
Perhaps that was even true. After all, this is a man who as the Director of Public Prosecutions in the Blair government proved remarkably unaware of the tears of an entire generation of white working-class children raped by grooming gangs. If you can ignore that, and even rule that prosecutions should not occur . . . well, what’s one middle-aged Chancellor crying, by comparison?
And that of course is something which springs to mind for any of us judging just how much sympathy we feel for Reeves herself.
When people reach the senior most positions in politics, particularly Shadow Cabinet and Cabinet posts, they are considered to assume collective responsibility. They aren’t supposed to criticise publicly the key policies of the government they serve in, and they are also supposed to have an opportunity to influence that policy in discussions around the Cabinet table. They all, at least theoretically, had a voice in the decision, and they all shoulder some of the guilt for the consequences.
This is why, after all, politicians who strongly oppose a decision taken by the government in which they serve resign when they consider it impossible for them personally to support it. Nigel Lawson, Thatcher’s Chancellor, did this in 1989 in a move which marked the beginning of her end, as did Robin Cook in 2003 from the Blair government in protest at the invasion of Iraq. Reeves is a more recent arrival in the upper echelons than Keir Starmer, but still has 14 years of senior experience. Way back in 2011 she received her first senior appointment, serving as Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury.
Fourteen years at the top end of the Labour Party represents a lot of collective guilt for a lot of vile moments, while just a year as Chancellor in this particular government, given its appalling record, constitutes a lot of very specific, very unavoidable guilt for which Reeves herself is personally responsible. It is supposedly the Chancellor who designs the entire economic platform of the government, who makes the Budget decisions, and who sets the agenda for every economic move. So if the first year of that government shows vast budgetary incompetence, the Chancellor is incompetent. If millions of citizens are struggling under economic conditions that represent abject failure, the Chancellor is an abject failure. And if some of those economic decisions seem to punish ordinary people grossly for no significant economic benefit – like the inheritance tax on farmers which obtains a pitiful £500million or so in annual revenue at the cost of potentially destroying the entire British farming industry, or like the shocking decision to scrap the winter fuel allowance for many OAPs, which the same party in opposition had said would result in thousands of pensioner deaths (a policy so obviously unpopular and spiteful it has since been reversed) – the guilt lies with Reeves.
Nor do these policies slightly damage the pennies in someone’s pocket. They are policies with broad and grotesque social harms attached to them – which result in tens of thousands of farming families worrying about whether they can continue and what the future holds, and thousands of elderly and vulnerable people dying of hypothermia when they can’t afford to heat their homes. While emotive arguments are generally the weakest, there is a good deal emotively and genuinely to detest in the measures Reeves has decided upon. These are real harms to real people, and none has even the limited excuse of significantly increasing government revenue, reducing budget deficits or prompting more general economic success elsewhere.
The British economy remains utterly stagnant, around 0.1 per cent last quarter and a still miserly 0.7 per cent of growth the last time I checked. The overall picture is bleak. Along with the punitive economic measures for little reward levied at farmers and pensioners, the tax burden overall is ruinously high and similarly punitive measures aimed at very wealthy residents have seen a record exodus of millionaires. Reeves has pointed the economy in a frankly Marxist direction of punishing wealth, and the results have been as dangerous as they were predictable. Just as wealth fled France from 2013 in response to the Hollande government introducing a supertax rate of 75 per cent, so have the Reeves tax measures driven away both British and foreign millionaires in record numbers. Reeves accelerated an existing trend, since 30,000 millionaires have left London in the last ten years. Under her stewardship, a millionaire leaves Britain every 45 minutes, with 10,800 going in her first year.
We are driving away those who can spend and invest heavily, employ others, and contribute through private spending as well as via taxation, based on a classic Marxist failure to understand that poor people get even poorer when rich people are driven abroad (or under Communism, of course, murdered). One of the scandals that has damaged Reeves personally was the revelation that she had lied for years about her working experience, claiming to be a corporate economist when she was no such thing. But her clumsy treatment of everyone from farmers to non-doms suggests she’s never even heard of the Laffer Curve, and despite holding senior political economic posts in the same period she also failed to notice just how badly her policies had already and very recently failed in France.
At the same time Chancellor Reeves has signed off on the kind of economic decisions most designed to make a mockery of claims of strict accounting and necessary restraint. While crippling independent farmers and burdening private households and driving away millionaires, the first year of this government has seen absurdly generous pay rises for junior doctors (who promptly responded to the generosity by going on strike again). Awarding inflation-busting pay rises of up to 20 per cent to branches of the public service who overwhelmingly vote Labour looks exactly what it is when coming alongside very punitive measures on the private sector – an inflation of the State, a corrupt favouritism and patronage system of pay for votes, and a mockery of general financial probity that causes bitterness and resentment at the clear unfairness of this redistributive effort.
Even more odious to the average voter has been the spectacle of a government taxing them till the pips squeak in a period of declining real income and increasing energy and food costs while lavishing generosity on incoming invaders, the defence of another realm, and Net Zero projects which increase all their household bills. Reeves has presided over an economy which taxes ordinary people heavily and spends the money putting illegal dinghy invaders in five-star hotels and gifting billions to foreign governments to tackle climate change. These are the kind of contradictions which leave the average citizen certain that we don’t just suffer under two-tier policing but two-tier economics as well, a part corporate corruption cycle, part Marxist redistribution plan, that harms us to help others.
All this explains why it’s very, very hard to feel much sympathy when Rachel Reeves cries. Given the decisions she has made, we feel that she is guilty of harming millions of us, and we know too that she has never distanced herself from any of the things which strike us as moral crimes. We know she has not cried for us, but for herself.
Discussion of those tears has tended to focus on the least important aspects of them. Feminists have sprung to her defence as a woman cruelly mistreated by the male politicians around her. Conversely, hard-nosed male commentators have opined on the unprofessional and overly emotional hysteria of the moment, or fallen into a similar trap of excessively chivalrous sympathy for her plight. In modern times it’s almost impossible for such a moment to occur without discussions of workplace bullying and mental health being dragged into the mix. And of course an apparent inability to cope with the pressure of the role has been linked, as I have above, with other aspects suggesting that Reeves was never equipped to be a Chancellor in the first place.
But there is an underlying truth here which is bigger than all of those factors. When we look at Starmer and Reeves we don’t see highly skilled, highly polished political performers who are at the apparent top because of a record of excellence. With Starmer’s complicity in grooming gangs getting away with it during the Blair terms or with anti-Semitism and terrorist sympathies while backing Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader in opposition, and with Reeves herself lying about her work history, what we see is a record of, by the most generous description you can think of, consistent mediocrity. A sort of leaden failure of both morality and performance.
Can we really believe in a system that tells us that this is the best we can do? More than that, do we really think these people have triumphed by genuine talents and their own efforts . . . or is it more likely that mediocrities rise not in spite of their inability but because of it? Such figures, surely, are a good pick if you need someone in that role that you can control, and if you really don’t want them to do a good job at all.
Of course some will say this is a conspiracy theory trope, and that it doesn’t rest on much other than dislike of the politicians cited. Incompetence is just incompetence; it doesn’t prove the existence of some hidden hand behind the scenes. And that is true. But the reality is these hands aren’t even that hidden. The average MP is beholden to all manner of interests that aren’t the interests of his or her constituents. And the higher they rise, the more beholden they are to more people and more interests. Most Labour MPs have to answer to the unions who fund them. Then there are the non-union party donors. Then there are the deals they do with each other as they negotiate their way through competitions for posts and perks and public notice. Then there are companies and lobby groups, and then there are transnational bodies and ideological commitments to those. Then there are key demographics in the MPs constituency, such the number of Labour MPs now completely dependent on block Muslim voting.
All of these are pulls away from the general good of the nation, from acting by what is right or sane, and from simply representing your constituents to the best of your ability.
And I think here is where the sources of those tears meet. Reeves was acting as an economist before she was acting as an MP and finally acting as a Chancellor. This wasn’t ever someone of great talent with sound or even brilliant economic ideas. This was a person playing a role, repeating lines, and needing to appear competent but never needing to be competent, until now.
What the general public want as competence is a Chancellor who improves the economy and improves their lives. But the political competence that advances a career is now the servicing of various interests that can advance that career, with all the circular divorce from the interests of the nation that entails. Reeves had to please foreign corporate interests to be considered Chancellor material. She had to serve loyally and silently through whatever collective disaster or moral abomination Jeremy Corbyn or Keir Starmer delivered to be considered Chancellor material. She had to be considered amenable and pliable by the money men and the markets (that is, by powerful international financial figures) to be considered as a Chancellor. She had to prove time and again that she could put their interests first, rather than actual British interests. And she had to do this while simultaneously appealing to the ideological Marxist lunatics who vote Labour.
What all these required was not the actual delivery of success, but a bare illusion of competence that disguised the various betrayals going on. The job of Rachel Reeves was to destroy the British economy if that was what the real powers want, while maintaining just enough illusion of normality that would ensure people don’t rise up in protest. The modern British Chancellor serves a thousand masters before they once glance in the direction of basic economic competence. They must put on a competent act as a guardian of the British economy, rather like a security guard who is in on a robbery. The point at which the robbers ditch that Chancellor is the point where the innocent act fails. They aren’t got rid of for incompetence, but for failing to disguise the robbery.
Consider how the fuss now being made of Rachel’s tears, and what a distraction that is from some very odd realities around her. When this government came in, it said that there was a £20billion hole in the finances. Despite that, it spent its first year giving money away abroad at a furious rate, pledging far in excess of that £20billion in fresh spending to various foreign commitments. Now we are told there is an extra £5billion hole in the finances, but Starmer blithely promises trillions to Mauritius and continues with trillions to Ukraine. We are told that a faltering economy has the markets twitching – but they didn’t twitch through insane covid spending in the last Tory government, and they didn’t twitch when this Labour government smashed through all the economic negative markers that supposedly required the removal of Kwasi Kwarteng and Liz Truss.
The ‘markets’ didn’t care that this government was putting in more disastrous budgets and vaster open-ended spending commitments than those which supposedly created a run on the pound . . . but do care and wobble if Rachel Reeves cries.
Why? Well, in the same way a robber is happy when his security guard accomplice lets him in to rob the bank, but unhappy if that accomplice through nerves or glaring error reveals that something suspicious is going on. He doesn’t want the security guard crying. The security guard is supposed to be pretending that everything is fine. The Labour Chancellor is there not to make average British citizens richer or happier. She is there to pretend to be aiming for that, while serving other interests which frequently rob the British voter blind or directly damage the British economy. She’s not there to serve us, but to serve them, and she’s not there to succeed in delivering things to us, but succeed in delivering us to them.
And if she gives the game away, THAT is when they call her incompetent. THAT is when they worry about her ‘performance’.
