To get one incoherent speech on the economy may be regarded as a misfortune. To get two in the same morning… well, it did at least move us towards an explanation of why people have to keep making them.
Breakfast television interrupted its discussions of diets and celebrities writing children’s books to take us live to Downing Street. Is there a more cursed appointment? You’re safer answering a summons to a graveyard at midnight than going to a dawn speech in the Allegra Stratton Memorial Briefing Suite.
The impression that ministers had just learned Britain was about to be hit by an asteroid the size of Birmingham was only heightened by Rachel Reeves’s pallor. Perhaps it was the lighting, but the Chancellor of the Exchequer looked like someone who had been visited overnight by a number of dread spirits, possibly the Ghosts of Budgets Yet to Come.
“I want people to understand the circumstances we are facing,” she began. It must be bad. Had she finally pried open the desk drawer that Jeremy Hunt had left locked, and discovered that he and Rishi Sunak had bet the entire NHS budget on an accumulator at Haydock Park?
Well, not exactly. It turned out that Conservative austerity policies had damaged public services and infrastructure, that their indecision had cut off investment, that Brexit had damaged exports, that the pandemic had cost a lot, and that the Ukraine war had driven up prices.
“This isn’t about relitigating old choices,” Reeves reassured anyone worried that ministers might actually open a discussion about fixing any of that. “It’s about being honest with the people about the consequences that those choices have had.”
This was her pitch, that she was being honest with voters about Britain’s economic situation. Although it led to an immediate question: what has she been up until now? You can say a lot about the issues she points to, but not that they’re new.
Some things have changed in the last year: Donald Trump’s madcap tariff policy has added an exciting element of unpredictability to global trade. Reeves did mention that, though not in those terms. And business taxes, a rising minimum wage and new regulations have hit employment. For some reason Reeves didn’t go into that.
But what did all this mean? There must be some reason for interrupting everyone’s mornings beyond explaining that the Tories made a hash of government. “People put their faith in me to take our country forward,” Reeves said. Which people? Were those people in the room with us now? “If we are to build the future of Britain together, we will all have to contribute to that effort.”
To those of us used to political code, this was the moment. She had, in the jargon, “sent her strongest signal yet” that last year’s manifesto is in the bin and tax rises are coming. This is, in another bit of jargon, “pitch-rolling” for a difficult announcement, and ministers do it all the time. Usually, though, they do it in 11am speeches in factories, with no one except journalists and a few confused businesspeople watching.
Reeves on the other hand had demanded national attention for this opaque statement. What would it mean to viewers at home, those who don’t spend their lives in Lobby briefings, searching for microscopic shifts in language? “Each of us must do our bit,” the Chancellor said. How? Build a bomb shelter in the garden with a vegetable patch on top? She’d told us she wanted to be honest, but she couldn’t bring herself to say out loud the words that she’d asked us there to hear.
Afterwards, journalists tried to get it out of her, asking repeatedly if taxes were going up. “That’s not what today is about,” she replied, an answer that was, according to taste, the most dishonest or stupidest thing she said all morning — a high bar, whichever you pick. Several times more she said she wanted to be honest, without taking the essential next step of actually being honest: not just that tax rises are coming, but that they were always coming, that the promise they weren’t coming was a foolish one that could never be kept.
Then it was round the corner for the second confused economic speech of the morning. Kemi Badenoch was giving a reprise of the words she said last week. Then she had demanded Reeves resign both for breaking her tax promises and for failing to get a landlord’s license. Weirdly the Conservative leader repeated neither call on Tuesday morning, which tells you how seriously you should take her the next time she makes a similar call.
Badenoch did agree with Reeves about one thing: that the country is in a mess. And like Reeves, she asked us to pretend that this had only become obvious in the last couple of weeks. “It has stopped making sense to work,” she said, which certainly explains her approach to opposition.
“We have a plan to get Britain working,” she went on. “In fact, we have many plans.” She didn’t mention that the Conservatives now have slightly fewer plans than they did last week, as they’ve junked Chris Philp’s plan to deport more people than Idi Amin.
Has that moment of policy confusion, in which it became clear that Badenoch didn’t understand her own proposals, dented her confidence? Not a bit of it! The chancellor “clearly hasn’t read our plans,” she said, “or looked at our record in office.” Though in fairness to Reeves, neither has Badenoch.
What should the government do? It was easy, she explained: cut £23 billion from the welfare budget. One of Badenoch’s refrains in her first year as leader has been that it is easy to make empty promises in opposition. As she begins the second, she seems intent on proving this.
Reeves is likewise condemned out of her own mouth. “Politicians of recent years have become addicted to shelling out for short-term sticking-plaster solutions rather than making long-term economic plans,” she said. Well, quite.
