Voices: Rachel Reeves’s growth speech felt more like an emergency Budget
Voices: Rachel Reeves’s growth speech felt more like an emergency Budget
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Allies insist that, after a gloomy start in the job, the chancellor had long planned to shift up a gear – but her announcement of a third Heathrow runway and a ‘Silicon Valley’ from Oxford to Cambridge felt suspiciously like someone in a hurry to correct her own mistakes, says Andrew Grice.
Rachel Reeves’s much-trailed speech today is a big moment for her and the government, as it finally put some much-needed flesh on the bare bones of its plan for economic growth. This matters because the clearer message should galvanise Whitehall and ensure that one of Reeves’s audiences – her cabinet colleagues – get the message. She is right to try to boost the UK’s anaemic growth levels; if she fails, Labour’s mission to improve public services will prove impossible.
Completing her remarkable 180-degree turn after her post-election gloom, Reeves declared herself “upbeat and optimistic about our country’s prospects” but argued: “We have got to turbocharge our economy.”. Her allies tell me she always planned a “gear shift” this month, to go positive and go for growth. However, her speech in Oxfordshire felt like another Budget speech only three months after she delivered her first one, as she listed government programmes and name-checked every region, to counter the argument that her package was too biased towards south-east.
It looked suspiciously like a chancellor correcting her own mistakes after overdoing the doom and gloom, as she tried to pin the blame on her rotten fiscal inheritance on the Conservatives and harming business and consumer confidence with last October’s Budget.
