When the Chancellor gets it wrong, it’s always somebody else’s fault.
Rachel Reeves has made some bad decisions but won’t own them (Image: Getty)
Rebounding inflation, rising bond yields, soaring unemployment, record borrowing. None of them have anything to do with Rachel Reeves. Sluggish economic growth? Not her department. Businesses closing, jobs vanishing, growth flatlining. Don’t blame the Chancellor. It’s all down to global market conditions, Nigel Farage, Brexit, the Tories, even Donald Trump’s tariffs. Not her..
In the Chancellor’s mind, the tanking UK economy has got nothing to do with her disastrous Budget, £25billion jobs tax or failure to curb spending. Nor is the soaring debt and deficit, and ever widening £40billion or £50billion black hole. How unfair to blame Rachel Reeves. She’s only the one in charge.
Blame always lies elsewhere. This time, Reeves has come up with the most laughable excuse of all. She’s blaming men, or to be precise, “mansplainers”.
It sounds absurd, but that’s what she’s done. She told The Times she’s “sick of people mansplaining how to be Chancellor”. She said she feels pressure to prove herself to “boys who now write newspaper columns” and label her “Rachel from accounts”.
She doesn’t strike me as a natural Express reader, so I don’t know if she’s referring to my columns, which lean to the critical. I’m a financial journalist. It’s my job to analyse the Chancellor of the day.
I’m not a boy and I don’t call her “Rachel from accounts”, because yes, I do think that it’s a bit sexist. I’m not telling her how to do her job either. It’s a horrible job. Impossible, in her case, because Labour backbenchers won’t let her take tough decisions on spending. All I do is point out where she’s gone wrong, which is practically everywhere.
That’s nothing to do with her gender. I dug out my old columns on former Tory chancellor Jeremy Hunt, who identifies as a man, and I was harsh on him too.
I said power had gone to his head as he smiled while squeezing the country with austerity. I accused him of playing “silly buggers” by freezing income tax thresholds then fobbing us off with pre-election National Insurance cuts. Was that mansplaining? Or man-to-mansplaining?
I checked my views on Liz Truss too. I called her Calamity Liz, and declared she was deluded. None of that was because she’s a woman.
Reeves has killed growth, driven up taxes, destroyed jobs, wiped out thousands of businesses, slapped inheritance tax on farmers and family firms and threatened to leave 10million pensioners freezing.
If any man had done that, I’d be doing my nut. It’s in my job description.
I’ve hammered Reeves’s political hero Gordon Brown for ruining pensions with his stealth tax raid, selling Britain’s gold reserves for a song and fuelling an unsustainable spending boom to buy his way into No 10. He’s a man. Didn’t stop me.
I have more sympathy with her other comments. Elsewhere in the interview she says: “There are lots of people who say cut taxes and the economy will grow, but what spending would they cut?”
No politician has the answer to that. Cuts hurt. The Tories failed, despite all that austerity. Nigel Farage will struggle too.
But I’ll keep challenging the Chancellor’s decisions. Not because she’s a woman but because she’s made mistakes and blamed others. And now she’s done it again.
