OPINION
Rachel Reeves is humiliating Britain (Image: Getty Images)
The fantastical, farcical, fiscal fair rolled into Westminster this week, utterly detached from reality as it peddled its expensive delusions. In the make-believe world created by the Chancellor Rachel Reeves, huge sums of public money can be conjured out of thin air, debts can be ignored, and Treasury balance sheets can be soaked in red ink without concern.
On entering the Cabinet last July, Reeves presented herself as the new Iron Chancellor on a mission to rebuild the public finances. Now in the face of deepening unpopularity, she has decided to transform herself into the Queen of Financial Extravagance. Prudence has been replaced by profligacy, restraint by recklessness. She is now not so much, “Rachel from Accounts” as “Rachel from the Insolvency Division”.
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When the maverick right-winger Javier Milei became President of Argentina in 2024, he adopted the chainsaw as a symbol of his determination to slash state bureaucracy. In contrast, the jet wash could be the emblem of Reeves’ mismanagement, given her growing eagerness to spray around taxpayers’ cash.
During her statement on the Spending Review, Reeves may have been loudly cheered by her fellow Labour MPs.
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Yet the display of partisan adulation in the Commons only emphasised how ill-judged her policy is. This was traditional spendthrift socialism at its worst where services and initiatives are judged not on their quality but how much money they consume.
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Normally so robotic, the Chancellor seemed almost intoxicated by her mounting list of commitments including ￡30billion more for the NHS, record sums for schools, an extra ￡4billion-a-year on affordable housing, and a massive increase in defence expenditure by ￡11billion annually.
Altogether an extra ￡190billion is to be allocated on day-to-day spending by public services during the period covered by this Spending Review, a figure which makes a nonsense of all the claims about the “tight settlement”.
In addition, there is the splurge on capital projects, such as the new ￡14billion nuclear plant at Sizewell C in Suffolk, ￡15billion for new transport links across the north of England, and ￡86billion on science and technology research.
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It is absurd to pretend, as some commentators have done, that we are entering a new period of austerity. In truth the state has never been bigger, its services better funded, its social security more generous or its workforce larger.
The great historian AJP Taylor wrote that, at the beginning of the 20th century, a policeman and a postman were the only two state employees that the average British citizen was likely to encounter.
Today, the public sector accounts for around a fifth of all jobs, while the civil service alone, with a staff of 500,000-plus, has grown by almost 100,000 since 2016.
The swelling bureaucracy is matched by a benefits system that has spiralled out of control, becoming a catalyst for dependency, family breakdown, and unemployment.
At the same time, the Government’s fiscal looseness has fed a culture of entitlement among the public sector unions reflected in exorbitant pay demands and the protection of unproductive working practices.
“This is the Labour choice,” Reeves declared at the end of her statement. But she has no cause for boasting. Throughout British political history Labour governments have always ended in financial crisis.
As Margaret Thatcher once wisely said: “The problem with socialism is that you always end up running out of other people’s money.” Reeves’s spending plan looks completely unsustainable. Already the storm clouds are gathering.
Only yesterday it was announced that the economy shrank by 0.3% in April, a protectable consequence of the hammering businesses have taken from tax rises. Job losses are also rising steadily – up 55,000 in April alone.
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Britain’s annual deficit has now reached ￡150billion and our overall national debt stands at ￡2.7trillion, with the result that the government pays ￡100billion-a-year just in interest charges – far more than is spent on defence or criminal justice. Borrowing will not be enough to cover the Government’s costs.
That means taxes will have to increase further, hiking the burden to its highest level since the Second World War.
Reeves talks grandly about Britain’s “renewal” but in truth she is dragging towards national humiliation and meltdown.
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