Nobody should cheer that. But it’s impossible to ignore the fact that the Chancellor has made mistake after mistake, with little sign she’s learned from any of them. The charge sheet is lengthy. She tanked sentiment the moment she took office, loudly claiming to have inherited the worst fiscal situation since the Second World War. That reckless exaggeration spooked investors and confirmed to the world that Britain was broke.
Then she banged on and on about that £22billion Tory “black hole” she somehow missed, using it to justify a string of punitive policies. Reeves then terrifed businesses and consumers with warnings of a tax onslaught four months down the line. When her £40billion Budget raid finally landed, it was even worse than feared.
The rise in employers’ national insurance has already cost 275,000 jobs. Her raid on inheritance tax reliefs for family firms and farms is pure class war. The doomed non-dom crackdown is driving wealth abroad – leaving ordinary taxpayers to pick up the bill.
Meanwhile, she threw cash at public sector workers with inflation-busting pay rises, without demanding a single productivity improvement in return.
She’s destroyed her fiscal headroom not once, but twice.
All of that would be reason enough to go. But no – Reeves won’t resign over any of it. Because in today’s Labour Party, her tax and spend splurge counts as “Tory austerity”.
What’s pushed her to the brink is something else entirely. She tried to do one of the few sensible things on her record, trim the ballooning bill for working-age health-related benefits.
That bill jumped from £36billion in 2019/20 to £52billion last year. Without reform, it’ll hit £66billion by 2029/30, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies.
Reeves tried to claw back just £5billion via modest changes. Now she’ll be lucky to save £5.50.
Why? Because her own party won’t have it. Labour backbenchers, drunk on self-righteousness and economic ignorance, revolted. Cabinet grandees like Angela Rayner and Ed Miliband egged them on.
Reeves saw the numbers, saw the crisis coming, and tried to act. But the left-wing mob won. The bill was gutted. She cried.
I’d have cried too, in her shoes. Because if even this reform can’t get through, the country’s finances are doomed.
For all her faults, Reeves is the only member of Labour’s frontbench who seems to grasp the scale of the threat.
But she’s finished now. The Left of her party smells blood. They want more spending, more taxes, more fantasy. Reeves tried to hold the line – and was crushed. Or rather, “clusterf*****”.
It’s surreal to write, but Reeves has become the only grown-up in a room full of spoiled children. A Chancellor surrounded by MPs who’ve never met a pound they didn’t want to borrow, spend or tax.
Yes, the damage she’s done with her tax raids is deep and lasting. But at least she tried, once, to apply a touch of fiscal discipline.
Her biggest mistake wasn’t policy. It was trusting Keir Starmer to back her. He didn’t. As she crumbled in public, he just droned on about his own achievements.
The man has all the empathy of a callcentre chatbot. His belated message of support had to coded in, by aides desperate to retain the pretence that he’s human.
Kemi Badenoch called her a “human shield”. She’s right. Reeves was the barrier between Labour’s vanity politics and economic reality.
Starmer let her sink because he’s too cowardly to fight the factions in his own party.
If Reeves truly believes in sound public finances, she should jump ship now. Because nobody else in Labour does.
And her boss only thinks of himself.