I won’t let critics get to me, says Reeves after speculation about her future
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Chancellor says she has the ideas needed to turn things around after week of speculation about whether she can remain in post. Rachel Reeves has said she is not going to let her critics get her down after a bruising week of speculation about whether she could be ousted as chancellor.
Reeves said she is qualified for the job and has the ideas to turn things around, amid worries about falling business confidence and the rising cost of government borrowing. “I haven’t taken it personally this week. It’s political,” she said on the BBC’s Political Thinking with Nick Robinson. “Some people don’t want me to succeed. Some people don’t want this government to succeed. That’s fair enough. That’s their prerogative. But I’m not going to let them get me down. I’m not going to let them stop me from doing what this government has got a mandate to do, and that is to grow the economy, to make working people better off.
“People have been through a tough time the last few years. The cost of living crisis has taken its toll. Our economy has not been competitive enough. People’s wages have stagnated. We’ve got a lot of work to do.”. Reeves was also pressed on whether her decisions to raise national insurance for employers had dented business confidence.
She defended her choice, saying: “What was the alternative?”. “Of course, all decisions have consequences,” she said. “But imagine the alternative. Imagine that I hadn’t addressed that problem. And now when financial markets look at the UK, they would be saying this is a government that is not real about the situation that it faces. It is spending more money than it is bringing in. It’s having to borrow more and more.
