Rachel Reeves is a ‘dummy’ – meet the tax-hungry zealot who’s really scripting her Budget
The Chancellor will front tomorrow’s Budget, but it’s not really hers.
Chancellor Rachel Reeves will present the Budget, but Torsten Bell is writing it (Image: Getty)
Rachel Reeves and Keir Starmer were thick as thieves during the election, working together to win power by misleading voters about their real intentions once they got there. The PM hasn’t just betrayed the public, now he’s hung his Chancellor out to dry too. Starmer has already forced Reeves into three humiliating U-turns over the winter fuel payment, welfare cuts and plans to hike income tax in this Budget.
Spineless Starmer caves the moment a few backbenchers get grumpy. Reeves has made plenty of mistakes, but she’s the only senior figure in Labour who grasps the basic idea that a country has to balance the books. Most of her colleagues would torch billions on their pet projects, funding it all by taxing the economy into the ground. And that’s what’s going to happen tomorrow.
Starmer lost faith in Reeves after last year’s disastrous Budget, so he’s drafted in an entire shadow Treasury to second-guess her every move: Darren Jones, Minouche Shafik, Dan York Smith, James Murray and Dan Tomlinson.
But the most influential figure of all is Torsten Bell. He isn’t just advising on the Budget. He’s effectively writing it. And from what I hear, he’s already irritating half the building. Soon he’ll be driving the rest of us mad too.
I’ve written about fresh-faced Bell before, describing him as a man who’s never met a tax he didn’t want to raise. He spent 10 years at think tank the Resolution Foundation, where he spent his days dreaming up new levies.
Bell has no sense of how business works, what motivates people or how wealth is created. His only desire is to grab other people’s money and divvy it up, even if it means crushing growth and trapping even more households on welfare.
Now he finally has the chance to unleash every daft idea he’s cooked up over the years, and as this list shows, there’s an awful lot of them. Treasury insiders say he talks endlessly and listens to nobody. Since he already knows everything, why bother?
Bell is chief secretary to the Treasury, appointed straight after winning a safe seat last year. He’s never had to face proper voter scrutiny, only conference halls full of suited Leftists nodding along to whatever new tax wheeze he proposes.
He won’t be facing the cameras tomorrow, either. That job falls to the beleaguered Rachel Reeves, who’ll have to pretend this is her Budget when large chunks of it have been shaped by Bell and Starmer’s team, two of whom also arrived from the Resolution Foundation. Labour MPs now describe Reeves as a ventriloquist’s dummy, operated by Bell.
Torsten Bell (right) where he belongs: in a left-wing talking shop (Image: Getty)
In her first Budget, Reeves hiked capital gains tax. Bell pushed for that. She slapped inheritance tax on farmers, family firms and pension pots. Those ideas were his too.
This time she’s expected to unveil a “mansion tax” on higher-value properties. Another Bell notion. He also floated proposals to cut the ISA allowance and has a long list of plans to drag more estates into inheritance tax.
Bell even wanted to raid the 25% pension tax-free lump sum and tear up pension tax relief. Reeves and the Treasury killed those, but pension salary sacrifice schemes will go.
Reeves won another vital battle. Bell and Starmer crony Shafik wanted a 20% exit tax on wealthy entrepreneurs moving abroad, a move that would have sent Britain’s brightest talents fleeing at speed. The Chancellor blocked it, thankfully.
Unfortunately, she’s lost the war. As one insider reportedly put it: “This is the Resolution Foundation’s Budget. This is an experiment in letting those people run riot.”
So here’s my word in Reeves’s defence. She’s woken up to economic reality. Yet she’ll be the one forced to sell Bell’s nonsense and take the blame when it all falls apart.
If the pound takes a battering and the markets revolt, she’ll be out. But don’t celebrate. Because there’s every chance baby-faced assassin Bell will be waiting in the wings.
The idea of Torsten Bell having free rein over next year’s Budget is genuinely frightening. That’s if there’s any wealth left for him to tax.
