Will Rachel Reeves be the change Britain needs?

Infighting in the Labour Party and a divided left has handed successive election victories to the Tories for generations. For as long as I have been politically sentient, I have strongly believed that perfection should not be the enemy of good – getting the Tories out should always be the number one priority. In that regard, the polls are looking great: Labour is expected to absolutely clean up at the next election and with a bit of luck, Sunak will keep digging the Tories further into a hole and they won’t even be the official opposition. 

However, I am finding it hard to get excited about a Labour victory, if I’m honest. What is there to get excited about when their only commitment is to yet more neoliberal populism?

I have been to an event where the Shadow Chancellor, Rachel Reeves was speaking. After about ten minutes, I deduced that she was economically clueless, transphobic and unwilling to face basic questioning from what was a fairly tame crowd. I’m not a fan. Still, not wanting to let perfection be the enemy of good, as before, I have carried on supporting the Labour Party and fighting against the “oh politicians, they’re all the same” argument. 

My patience is wearing a bit thin now, though. Reeves has now started comparing herself to Thatcher. To be fair there are some immediate similarities: populist, champions of a flawed ideology, anti LGBTQIA+, anti-trade union… the list goes on. 

Let’s be clear – Thatcher’s flawed efforts to reduce inflation and ideologically motivated attacks on trade unions absolutely destroyed British industry. Mines, shipyards, factories – gone. Her policies took the jobs and purpose away from entire communities almost overnight. Communities that were then forced to take government handouts to be able to survive and demonised for doing so. She asset-stripped the country. By 1979, the population of Britain collectively owned two-thirds of housing and all of the energy sector, the railways, ferries, national airlines, the telecoms network, the postal service; the factories that produced trains, cars, trucks, buses, defence aircraft; the plants that made steel; the coal, oil and gas under the ground, and so much more. Her policies have directly led to the current cost-of-living crisis, housing crisis, collapse in bus services, sky-high rail fares – as all of these have happened thanks to the prioritisation of private profit rather than quality public service.

These public assets were not a divine gift, they were all nationalised after the war by a Labour government that inherited an economic situation far worse than the one that Starmer and Reeves will. They made the ideological choice to stop prioritising private profit. 

Reeves might fancy herself as the next Thatcher, but there is one key difference between 2024 and 1979: Thatcher had assets to sell to fund her ideology. She could generate quick cash injections to cover up the fact that we could no longer produce our way out of recession, but what has Reeves got left to sell off? The only thing left that the population collectively owns (most) of is the NHS…

The part of Thatcher’s legacy that I find particularly terrifying is just how widespread the lie that Government finances must be run like that of a household has become. She portrayed herself as “the thrifty housewife” that was running Britain on a shoestring to get national debt down. This idea was further weaponised by the Cameron-Osborne government, who used austerity to slash public spending and pour public money into the hands of the private sector, in the name of debt reduction. Labour look set to continue peddling this lie. Keynesian economics tells us that governments can only spend their way out of recession: borrow and invest when times are bad and earn it back when times are good.