Rachel Reeves delivered a bold speech that set a clear sense of direction for the Labour government. She pretended that there are no contradictions between going for economic growth and other objectives that matter to her party, but the implication was that she was prepared to overcome internal opposition to deliver in the national interest. If that turns out to be true, we will look back at this speech as a significant moment.
Of course, many of the benefits of the policies that she announced will take a long time to materialise. There is nothing wrong with that. What was wrong was that Ms Reeves and Sir Keir Starmer sometimes appeared to suggest that there were easy answers to the nation’s problems – it was just that the Conservatives failed to adopt them.
In this speech, the chancellor started to set out what could indeed be the work of a decade. If she means what she says, her focus on the long term will be welcome. The Labour criticism of recent Tory chancellors is that they chopped and changed too quickly as they sought short-term fixes to try to avoid the electorate’s wrath.
If Ms Reeves sustains the acceleration of planning decisions and tilts them in favour of growth; if she is serious about getting regulators out of the way of entrepreneurs; and if she gets her way against cabinet colleagues who are working against growth – then this could be a long-termism that The Independent could support.
Perhaps what was most significant about her speech, delivered at Siemens in Oxfordshire, was the sense of urgency that ran through it. Describing a solar farm in Cambridgeshire that was proposed four years ago and has only now been given the go-ahead, she exclaimed in an authentic taxi-driver tone, “It’s ridiculous!”
She cited the £100m bat tunnel for HS2 and declared that it was time “to stop worrying about the bats and the newts”.
But there were plenty of reasons in her speech for scepticism about whether she would stick to the course through the inevitable storms to come.
Urgency is all very well, but six months into a new government it feels a little late. It feels almost as if the confirmation that the government supports the third runway at Heathrow was a gesture designed to impress business leaders and to distract them from the employers’ national insurance increase due to take effect in April.
The Independent has long been sceptical about Heathrow expansion: we have tended to agree with Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, when he is out of government emphasising our climate obligations, rather than when he is in government emphasising the green safeguards.
Ms Reeves said in her speech: “There is no trade-off between growth and net zero – quite the opposite.” But of course there is a trade-off, because the cost of decarbonisation will make our energy more expensive. If she means – by the tenor of the rest of her speech – that she will resist Mr Miliband’s idealistic proclamations about net zero automatically leading to higher growth and good jobs, so much the better.
She also has to resist the attempt by Angela Rayner, the deputy prime minister, to load even more burdens on employers by her well-meaning but flawed Employment Rights Bill. Kemi Badenoch, the Tory leader, was right to describe it as an “unemployment bill” at Prime Minister’s Questions today, and a government that was serious about growth would strip it of the costs that it will impose, discouraging businesses from hiring and penalising young people who need entry-level jobs.
Of course the pursuit of prosperity has to be balanced by concerns about the environment and social justice. What matters is a government’s priority.
The significant thing about Ms Reeves’s speech today was that she pointed in the right direction. This is now her test. If she can impose her will on her colleagues, she will deserve the epithet: the iron chancellor.
