Thinking of the Chancellor makes me warm to Ebenezer Scrooge.
While Charles Dickens’ legendary miser was reluctant to spend his own money at Christmas, Rachel Reeves takes a different approach. She’s willing to splash the cash at any time, the problem is it isn’t hers. It’s yours, if you’re a taxpayer. So far, she’s hiked taxes by £66billion and borrowed another £132billion in the financial year to November.
This is driving up the deficit and the national debt, and hitting ordinary Britons in more immediate ways. Her tax-and-spend spree has destroyed hundreds of thousands of jobs, with unemployment rocketing from 4.1% to 5.1% under her watch. Tiny Tim had it rough at Christmas with Scrooge as his employer, but at least he had a job.
Too many young people don’t, as youth unemployment rockets to 16% under Reeves. That’s down to her £25billion ‘jobs tax’ and inflation-busting minimum wage hikes, which make hiring young people prohibitively expensive for cash-strapped businesses.
Christmas isn’t much fun when you don’t have a job, or any real prospect of finding one in the year to come.
High streets risked being wiped out by the latest blizzard of tax, pay and business rate hikes, while cash-strapped consumers leave many shopkeepers facing the worst Christmas on record. People simply don’t feel like spending after having their pockets picked by the Chancellor.
If you can afford a festive drink, spare a thought for publicans. Reeves has wrecked their Christmas too, sentencing many pubs to death with her latest tax raid that’ll drive up the cost of a pint of beer to £10. Even joyless old Scrooge didn’t do that.
Pensioners will have a tricky Christmas too. Two million will have lost their winter fuel payment, and if it was down to Reeves, 10 million would.
Even those who do get it will struggle to heat their homes, like poor Bob Cratchit with his solitary lump of coal, as Reeves’s fellow cabinet member Ed Miliband drives up energy bills with his hare-brained net zero charge.
They’ve already increased by £187 per household since Ed took charge, and this from a man who told us he’d cut them by £300.
Reeves has ruined her own Christmas too.
As Dickens wrote in A Christmas Carol: “No space of regret can make amends for one life’s opportunity misused.”
Reeves’ life ambition was to become Chancellor. Now she’ll go down as the most unpopular ever, thanks to her own blunders and deceptions.
She promised us growth. She called it her “defining mission”. We won’t get that for Christmas, that’s for sure.
The economy flatlined in August, then shrank in September and October. At this rate, we’re heading for a recession, dubbed a Reevescession.
Now she’s given us a reminder that the misery will continue next year, by scheduling her Spring Statement for March 3, 2026.
Thankfully, there shouldn’t be any tax heights, as we will use this t will provide an interim update on the economy and public finances.
But it will make as grim reading as anything in Dickens. Reeves will use it as an excuse to drone on about how she’s “restored stability” and fixed the foundations” of the economy, while she drives it further into the ground.
And paves the way for yet more tax hikes in her autumn Budget.
Another year of Reeves doesn’t bear thinking about, but here’s one happy festive for though. By this time next year, there’s a fair chance that she’ll be gone.
But with Ed Miliband among the front-runners to replace her, that Christmas could be even worse than this one.
