It is tradition, when there is a change of government such as the one apparently imminent in Great Britain, that the outgoing ministers leave a more or less long note on the desk for their successors, with advice on the task that awaits them and a relationship of the main problems. In 2010, Chief Treasury Secretary David Laws found a piece of paper from his predecessor on his desk with just one line of text: “Sorry, buddy, but there’s no money left.”
That, taken to the cube, barring an unexpected comeback from the Conservatives, is what awaits the next British Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves when, after the general elections, she takes the reins of the economy from the hands of Jeremy Hunt. Saying there is no money is too generous. The national debt is 100% of GDP, inflation and rates remain high, and the markets are not willing to lend money without knowing that the Government is going to recover it in taxes, or cuts, or with economic growth.
“I worry about everything, I’m an anguish lady,” says Reeves. There is no lack of reasons for her seeing her accounts from outside her, as a shadow minister, and even less will she be missing when she is the one who has to make the numbers balance. Taxes? They are already at the highest level in seventy years, after seeing 23 consecutive increases by the Tories, and he has also ruled out a wealth tax or raising the rate for the highest incomes. Cuts? Public services are in ruins, infrastructure is falling apart and eight million are waiting for public health operations. Growth? With productivity on the floor and 25% of the working-age population neither having a job nor looking for one, if someone has a magic wand it is time to go up on stage and show it.
But growth is her formula, although she herself has put a damper on the wheels by convincing her boss, Labor leader Keir Starmer, to renounce the investment plan of 35 billion annually in green energy, with the consequent creation of wealth and jobs, inspired by Keynesian theories and what Joe Biden has done in the US. Reasons? An economic one, that there is no money, and a political one, that her party does not want to scare away the millions of voters who do not trust Labor as a financial manager, her great burden.
Reeves is the closest thing there is to a right-wing Labor Party, the antithesis of the previous leader, Jeremy Corbyn, and the closest thing to former Blair minister Peter Mandelson, who coined the phrase that New Labor saw nothing wrong with being “filthy rich”. She has pushed Starmer to abandon the energy plan, conceived as the Party’s banner ahead of the elections, the plan to nationalize the railways, water, gas and electricity, make university tuition free and tax billionaires. Of her original promises, the only thing left is to apply VAT to private schools and prevent foreigners from registering as non-domiciled in the United Kingdom (non doms) to pay less to the Treasury.
From a pure Labor family (his sister and brother-in-law are MPs), his parents were teachers and his grandparents worked in a footwear company, in addition to being part of the Salvation Army. She studied at Oxford, she is 45 years old and her husband is a high-ranking government official. Before entering politics, she worked as an economist at the Bank of England and the British embassy in Washington. She doesn’t come from money but she can’t say she comes from the working class either, although Labor has changed that term to “ordinary working people”. She grew up in Thatcherism and her hero is former Prime Minister Gordon Brown for raising the minimum wage.
Brexit – it is estimated – is depriving the country’s economy of 50 billion euros a year. With a return to the EU impossible for the moment, Reeves aims to improve trade relations with the continent and attract investment in any way possible. Private companies – he affirms – must be the engine of growth. Traditional Labor members make crosses.
