OPINION
Chancellor Rachel Reeves Presents Spending Review in London (Image: Getty)
It’s a strange game politics. So very often the moves which shape the game are those happening off the ball while all eyes are on the striker. And so it was with Rachel Reeves and her mad-as-a-bag-of-snakes, so-called Spending Review. After a stutteringly catastrophic first year where the ditheringly cautious Keir Starmer attempted a Blairite New Labour centrist approach to the party and the voter, in an attempt to convince us this was a new fiscally prudent Labour, suddenly Rachel Reeves came out yesterday all undergraduate tax and spend class warrior... and rather spoiled Keir’s party.
And the reason for this spectacular volte-face comes in the unlikely form of Nigel Farage and his party’s even more spectacular lurch to the left. As bizarre as it may seem, Labour is now in a fight to the death with, er, a party with a grand total of five MPs. And even more bizarrely Nigel Farage, a man who has spent his political life being accused of being to the right of Goebbels, is apparently now the new Jeremy Corbyn with an appetite for nationalising anything which is not nailed down and a manifesto which can be roughly conveyed in three words “spend spend spend”.
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It’s a fight over the Red Wall vote you see. Because both parties think the Red Wall – that’s probably you by the way – is a bit thick, eminently biddable, easily bought off. It’s a very dangerous assumption. Not only did Reeves go through her fantasy review like a child going over their Christmas list, but she was mendacious with it. She talked of wages on the rise.
'We are well and truly screwed', says Daily Express Commentator Paul Baldwin, following Rachel Reeves' Spending Review today ??????？ @Baldwinrants
#westminster#parliament#dailyexpress#spendingreview#ukpoliticspic.twitter.com/VjR1WiVQxd
— Daily Express (@Daily_Express) June 11, 2025
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And they are, marginally, but this is because her leader chose to give massive pay rises to people who don’t actually create wealth (ie everyone who votes Labour) and will not increase productivity one jot. But it does falsely inflate the nation’s wage levels though so Reeves can claim pay is going up. It isn’t.
Not unless you are an orthopaedic consultant or a train driver. The other current ridiculous deception trotted out with depressing predictability by both Starmer and Reeves and every rabbit-in-headlights junior minister rolled out for TV duties is that Britain has the highest growth rate in the G7.
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It does. But only because the economies of the other six nations are currently basket-cases. To put that in perspective, Britain’s growth this year will be marginally smaller than Russia's. Yes that Russia, the one that is no longer in the G7, is fighting a three-year war and facing crippling economic worldwide sanctions... and we still can’t beat them.
Anyway, it seems to me that amid all this chaos and woe there is one inescapable conclusion: Rachel Reeves has just shocked the corpse of the Conservative Party back to life. In truth reports of the Tories’ death had been greatly exaggerated. Not that they didn’t deserve the kicking they got mind. They squandered a blistering majority, effectively railroaded their best electoral asset out of Dodge, and achieved, in recent years at least, the square root of bugger-all for Britain.
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But all you have to do in politics is bide your time and wait for everyone else to screw-up.
“Politics” as a very clever colleague of mine pointed out yesterday, “abhors a vacuum”. And if Reform go left (and Reeves goes there to head them off) then the Conservatives, who are quietly re-grouping and playing the long game under Kemi Badenoch, just have to go back to being proper Conservatives rather than the woke Christian Democrats Cameron turned them into, et voila.
And indeed Kemi was at her best at Prime Minister’s Questions yesterday, annihilating the Prime Minister with a consummate ease which has deserted her in recent weeks. She was right on the money – your money as it goes – asking over and over if Starmer was about to raise taxes. He is. There is no other fiscal wiggle room. The problem with socialism, as Margaret Thatcher pointed out, is that you eventually run out of other people's money. And when that happens the Labour Party only has three big sticks to wield. And they are all marked TAX.
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