July 30, 2024 - 7:00am
It was brutal, ferocious, personal — and effective. Looking out from the dispatch box yesterday afternoon, Rachel Reeves set about trying to dismantle not just the economic record of her opponent, Jeremy Hunt, but his character. The Shadow Chancellor looked shell-shocked.
If the Conservative Party’s reputation for economic management was already on life support, Reeves seemed determined to put it in the grave. The last government “covered up” a £22-billion black hole in the public finances, she said. Note: she was not accusing the party of simply overspending, but of overspending and then hiding this fact from the public. It was a serious charge. “They had exhausted the reserve and they knew that but nobody else did,” she claimed.
In response, Reeves set out the new mantra with which she hopes to be associated: “If we cannot afford it, we cannot do it.” It was, as one commentator noted, “reverse Keynesianism”. This was Reeves playing Margaret Thatcher. As a result, road, rail and hospital building projects were all cancelled. Most eye-catchingly of all, Reeves announced that winter fuel payments would be scrapped for pensioners not in receipt of pension credit, while plans to cap the cost of adult social care were binned. “The inheritance from the previous government is unforgivable,” the Chancellor declared. “They spent like there was no tomorrow.”
Reeves then set about rolling the pitch for a series of tax rises, welfare cuts and austerity measures to come in the Budget, which she announced would take place at the end of October. As Parliamentary performances go, Reeves’s tone of moral indignation was brutally effective. In terms of raw displays of power, it was also a moment of realisation for the Conservative Party that the period of nicey-nicey which followed the general election is well and truly over. This Labour government means business and is prepared to play rough.
The politics of yesterday’s performance are also obvious: get the unpopular stuff out of the way early while you have the political capital to do so. And yet, irrespective of the politics, there was also something desperately disappointing and, actually, boringly conventional about the substance of Reeves’s statement yesterday. Having denounced the record of the last Labour government, there was more than a whiff of early George Osborne about it all. Infrastructure projects to improve Britain’s long-term economic performance were jettisoned in order to balance day-to-day spending. This is exactly the kind of economic short-termism that economists such as Torsten Bell — now a Labour MP — have previously warned about. Britain is a monarchy where the Treasury is sovereign. And never more so than now.
Cancelling the “Dilnot” reforms which would have capped care home bills feels like a dreadful portent of what is to come. After 14 years of Tory governments trying and failing to do anything about the problem, now it looks as if Labour will do the same. The danger for Reeves is that this will become the story of the new government: conserving the status quo, prudently. And that will not be enough.
Tom McTague is UnHerd’s Political Editor. He is the author of Between the Waves: The Hidden History of a Very British Revolution 1945-2016, due to be published in September 2025
TomMcTague
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SubscribeWhat is going on with Unherd journalists ? This constant obsession with American society as well as the obsession with LGBT ++++ rights or extreme feminist agendas.is getting boring.
I will not be renewing my subscription.
Ditto.
American ideology tends to dominate the Anglosphere, unfortunately.
Maybe a sizable number of Americans read or contribute to Unherd? Maybe – as this Brit named Douglas Murray points out (among many) there is currently a War on the West. It is a global war and the West is not doing so well. Maybe – if one is on the side of the West like I am – it is vital to understand the enemy that one may defeat them. Maybe, as Mr. Moldbug Yarvin seems to indicate, the global peid pipers are associated with institutions in New York and London. One of those is in America for those of us that recognize quaint ideas like the nation-state and stuff. Maybe, post-British Empiire and prior to the Pandemic and the installation of Joe Biden as Vandal In Chief America may have been considered a global leader on many fronts. Maybe there are actually Americans that care about what goes on in Europe, European views of America, and American views of Europe in the context of a vehicle like Unherd, Finally, maybe what brought us here in the first place was being Unheard against the din of narrative and propaganda where, for example, Americans saw Nuremberg rising on the backs of greed and institutional capture, were being silenced for noticing, and reached out across the pond for others who feared implications. I want to live in a world where I don’t have to care about the agendas of the post-modernists and cultural Marxists. That time may not come in my reamining years.
I’ll give you this point – I found your reply to be so stunning that it supplanted my interest in any of the other articles I came here to read. And so far there are 27 up votes. WTF, Unherd readers…
Those issues, like it or not, form a major dividing line within the West, not only the US, and are therefore rather important culturally….
I find it much more disappointing that no one has actually commented with some knowledge on the substance of this article!
Which is all too typical on these fora.
I’d actually like to see some informed opinion on to what extent Islam is, or is not, more liberal on abortion.
You’re on safe ground whenever you start writing with the words ‘American liberals are confused about X’.
Like everything else in Islam, prohibition on abortion appears to be arbitrary. The general rule is that it is not permitted after 120 days. Why 120 days? No idea. But hey, when you’re philosophy is that anything which appears to justify my lusts is good, then I suppose in the particular case, Islam looks like a “progressive” force.
When you have no idea about something it doesn’t follow that it is arbitrary – it rather means you don’t know about it. Islamic interpretation, as far as I know, talks about reception of a soul to a baby at certain point of its life. Before that point, since a baby hasn’t received a soul, it’s not forbidden to terminate.
Which then raises the question, why does a child receive a soul on the 120th day? Why not day 72? Or day 200? Or — and here’s a provocative one — at the moment of conception? It seems I’m not the only one here lacking in the wisdom of Islam.
Do you know upon which passages the 120 day rule is based? I presume there is no reference as to the differentiation of the foetus between 120 and 115, or any other number? Given the often incoherence of the Quran, it is mind-numbing that it is used as a guidebook.
Not once does this author allow herself to use ‘pro-life’ for the Christian position on abortion. Several times she gives her ‘pro-choice’ credentials a polish just to stick the knife to these pesky religious nuts who dampen everyone’s sexual, economic and personal freedoms. In the news today, a child born at 23 weeks ‘perfectly formed’ said the parents (Metro 9 5 22 p11) – at an age that ‘anti-life’ proponents would have a child’s head crushed and limbs ripped off to enable the body to be removed from the mother’s womb. You do know that the body parts have to be counted in case the arm or leg got left behind? No? Not interested overmuch? Because it’s just a bunch of cells, isn’t it? Because I’ve got 12 children already and another child would be…[insert excuse] (not thinking of murdering one of the others though).
The womb should be the safest place for a child, not the most deadly. The rank hypocrisy of attacking Christians (anyone) who want those children to live by those who want to kill on the grounds of that child’s developmental age. The ‘anti-life’ denizens scream rare whatabouteries to conflate with the majority of abortions done for convenience sake. ‘O’ they scream ‘whataboutery the mother?’ If you don’t want that precious, precious life you made by mistake or poor timing, let me have her. Don’t you ever wonder at our distress and passion for those beautiful children.
But just you continue your blather, Ms Partridge – never mind the children.
The fundamental argument over abortion has little or nothing to do with religion itself other than attaching a statement of, “ because God said so” to the end of an argument. The fundamental argument over abortion is whether it is taking human life. And more importantly the most innocent and defenseless of human lives. For people who recognize conception as the beginning of “individual” life, abortion is tantamount to sadistic and horrific mass murder. And then the question arises is it morally acceptable to stand idly by while murder of the most innocent is being done. For them it is an atrocity that transcends the Jewish Holocaust by an order of magnitude. It is just that simple.
Complicating the matter are the issues of the rights of the unborn as well as the rights of the father. And the even deeper matter of human rights, in general. In any society no one is given a blank check regarding rights. While we like to believe that rights come from God the de facto truth is that rights are and always have been negotiable.
It’s good to see a fellow SOAS alumnus make such an interesting contribution.
However, orientalism, as Edward Said conceived it, combines a patronising misunderstanding of an alien culture, with the power structures that make the people of the alien culture vulnerable to being rescued, whether they want it or not.
We in the West went to immense lengths to prove Said right, in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yes, well…
Personally, I much prefer Ms Partridge’s reinterpretation of orientalism as cultural misunderstanding, full stop. As she shows, it can work in ways that Said never anticipated.
“have taken to”; “calling out”; “culture war staple”; “trend periodically on Twitter”; “‘the Christian version of the Taliban’”; “(not for the first time)”; “seeing semblance”; “patriarchal and oppressive systems”; “women’s bodies”; “backlash”; “outrage”; “the conflation”; “the former”; “patriarchal force of oppression”; “rooted”; “the latter”; “yet most strikingly”; “‘wait till y’all find out’”; “have resurfaced”; “recent controversial”; “interviewed Jewish, Muslim and Catholic”; “more nuanced”; “American culture war-ridden”; “has brought on”; “oppressive Abrahamic predecessor”; “we are seeing”; “strange and surprising”; “perhaps”; “during the colonial era”; “these views persisted”; “orientalist tropes”; “dialectic”; “ironically”; “paradigm”; “the latest incarnation”; “this is not deny”; “goes to show”.
All delightfully enjoyed over a cup of tea, no?
Why is ‘Western values’ in italics but not ‘patriarchal and oppressive white Christianity’, from the piece? Western values are Western values.
I hope the swathes of sociologists who were deep analysing the covert orientalists among us took time out to watch some good old movies like Singin’ In The Rain: more so after 9/11.
Just to add, the same old thing in same old drag. Americans need to enjoy life. They are in a grip of sanctimonious spouting. Life’s too short.
I’m just in the middle of reading P J O’Rourke’s book “Driving Like Crazy”. I’m really enjoying it. He describes his visit to a NASCAR event in the South and how much fun, joy, optimism there was in the crowd. He concludes, “This country didn’t come from people who worried about the future. It came from people who whipped the future’s ass.”
This a million times. I moved to the South six years ago and I love its general happiness and optimism.
Now there is in oxymoron: American liberal!
My current favourite is; Responsible Journalism