Taking aim at Nigel Farage’s Reform party, whose recent performance in the polls has alarmed Labour strategists, Bell said: “Just because someone shouts loudly doesn’t mean they’re an insurgent, who actually changes stuff rather than just talking about it.”.
“One thing I’ve definitely learned from six months as an MP: every Saturday I meet people – and if I’m door-knocking, in England as well as in Wales – who say, ‘My health is affecting everything else in my life,’” he said.
Britain’s crumbling public services are bad for business, and spending more taxpayers’ money to fix them is a pro-growth policy, the pensions minister, Torsten Bell, has argued.
To underline the scale of the challenge facing Labour in rebuilding the economy, Bell points to the grim fact that a typical man in 2024 was earning 7% less in real terms than his counterpart a full 20 years earlier.
He praises the policy of pensions auto-enrolment – widely viewed as a successful intervention that drove up pensions saving dramatically – but said the government now needed to ensure the system worked well for savers.
