Hearts & Minds: Reeves 2.0 – the new vocabulary of growth

Not so long ago, Rachel Reeves was invoking George Osborne. The Tory chancellor spoke of ‘thirteen years of… fiscal irresponsibility’, Reeves decried ‘fourteen years of… economic irresponsibility’. He promised to ‘fix the roof’, she pledged to ‘fix the foundations.’ Osborne railed against Gordon Brown’s ‘broken Britain’, Reeves lambasted Rishi Sunak for leaving a Britain that is ‘broke and broken’.

That was at the time of her Budget, when the chancellor was warning of a ‘Tory black hole’ and raising taxes. What better, than to turn to a predecessor who gave us ‘austerity’, although she was careful to avoid repeating that toxic word. An economist, Reeves also referenced John Maynard Keynes exhorting Britain to rebuild after the Second World War: ‘Anything we can actually do we can afford’. For Reeves, putting on the brakes, it became: ‘If we cannot afford it, we cannot do it.’

There is little language that is new in politics. In a sense it’s inevitable. Politicians are cut from the same cloth; they work in buildings redolent with history. They know the speeches that stuck. When it comes to writing theirs, they can’t help but draw on the past. Unfortunately for Reeves, her first Budget will be remembered for all the wrong reasons. Yesterday, we got the growth not cutting chancellor. Still, the bad stuff had to be got over, so Reeves 2.0 quietly brushed it aside. Her employers’ NI increase and other unpopular measures, she admitted ‘has consequences on business and beyond’. There are ‘costs to responsibility, but the costs of irresponsibility would have been far higher.’ Then, the voice was raised for a rapid-fire list of positivity, naming projects to have got the go-ahead. The master of boosterism was another Tory, Boris Johnson and there were echoes, albeit without his floridity. Reeves would not just go further, but ‘further and faster’, the case for an expanded Heathrow was not strong, it was ‘stronger than ever’. In case anyone had doubts as to what it would achieve, wave the flag and beat the world, a favourite Johnson ploy, so Heathrow would ‘make Britain the world’s best-connected place to do business.’ As with Johnson, any attempt to suggest places that could lay claim to be better-connected is to be dismissed.

On such occasions, a personal favourite nag away. From Nikita Khrushchev: ‘Politicians are the same all over. They promise to build a bridge even where there is no river.’

Chris Blackhurst is one of the UK’s foremost business journalists. He was previously Editor of The Independent and City Editor of the Evening Standard.