Rachel Reeves is falling apart – Keir Starmer must step in or she’ll take UK down with her
Everything the Chancellor touches falls to bits. This cannot go on.
Rachel Reeves is falling to pieces, and so is the UK economy (Image: Getty)
Rachel Reeves is a walking U-turn. It started with her announcement that she was axing the winter fuel payment for 10 million pensioners. In an instant, she wiped out Labour’s post-election honeymoon. PM Keir Starmer forced her to walk back on her plan, but by then the damage was done. We knew what she was like.
Starmer is now telling us that Labour has turned a corner. But there’s a problem. He keeps bumping into Rachel Reeves coming the other way. Her U-turns are coming thicker and faster. The pattern is relentless: she makes a lunatic move, Starmer forces her to backtrack, and she cobbles together a botch job in its place. Does anyone understand the new system for claiming winter fuel payments? Does Reeves?
Naturally, she U-turned on her election tax pledges. After claiming she’d only raise just £8.5billion by targeting non-doms, private schools and energy firms, she’s hit tens of millions of us for a staggering £66billion. Non-doms are fleeing the UK, taking their tax revenues with them, and she’s done a U-turn there too.
Reeves was forced to abandon plans to cut £5.5billion from the out-of-control health and sickness benefits bill after a backbench revolt. Cue another U-turn.
She’s performed an embarrassing reverse ferret on farmers’ inheritance tax, but only after pushing some farmers to the brink of suicide.
Remember how she was set to hike income tax in her last Budget, before causing more chaos by flipping at the last minute? Then she axed the two-child benefit cap, having repeatedly insisted it had to stay. And now we can add pub business rates to the long list of her U-turns.
Tax policy is tough, but these errors were basic, obvious mistakes. I literally gasped when I heard she was axing the winter fuel payment. Within seconds, I’d worked out it meant taking money from shivering old ladies on as little as £11,350 a year. Doesn’t someone in the Treasury own a calculator?
Charging inheritance tax (IHT) on family farms revealed a complete misunderstanding of a key sector of the economy. Farming runs in the blood. Most farmers want to pass their land on. She went for them anyway.
Reeves repeating the blunder by slapping IHT on family businesses. Many will have to be broken up when the founder dies, otherwise families face tens of billions in tax money. They don’t have it! It’s tied up in the business. Doesn’t Reeves get that? I thought she knew how to run a modern economy.
That must be her next U-turn. And there will be another after that, and another, unless Starmer bites the bullet and removes her.
He has to do it. We cannot afford this incompetent. Her £26billion “jobs tax” has sent unemployment soaring as companies can’t afford to take on young people. Then she throws taxpayer money at finding youngsters work when she’s just destroyed all the jobs. It’s awful to watch.
As well as trashing the prospects of a generation, Reeves is casually slaughtering entire sectors, led by hospitality, pubs, and hotels. GDP growth has flatlined.
And yet she ploughs on, droning about fixing the foundations and restoring stability, while smashing them with her wrecking ball. Not to mention borrowing £150billion a year and splurging it on pet Labour projects. Starmer has to act. Reeves has to go, or she’ll take us down with her. If it isn’t already too late.
