Establishment friend and Labour Party leader, Keir Starmer
Labour’s shadow chancellor—the person who wants to be in charge of government spending—parties with top Tory cutters and breakfasts with hundreds of bosses. That’s what she said in a fawning interview with the right wing Times newspaper on Saturday last week.
It opens with shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves “deep in conversation” with hated former Tory chancellor George Osborne while at a party “packed with Labour MPs and advisers”. While the Labour crowd danced to Things Can Only Get Better—the anthem of right wing icon Tony Blair—Reeves asked Osborne for advice.
As Tory chancellor, Osborne was in charge of launching a decade of austerity designed to make ordinary people pay for the 2007 financial crisis. Now he thinks he can “trust” Reeves to do the same. And he even said he wouldn’t mind a Labour government with her and leader Keir Starmer in charge.
“I now feel that with Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt and Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves we have two sets of people who are sensible and have integrity and are more than capable of governing the country,” he said. “I’m still a Conservative so I would rather have Rishi and Jeremy, but it wouldn’t be terrible for the country if it were Keir and Rachel.”
Such a ringing endorsement should be mortifying for the Labour Party as bosses once more want to make working class people pay. But Reeves and Starmer don’t think so. Her time as MP means she doesn’t see much difference between Labour and the Tories—made her “less tribal,” as she puts it.
Instead, former top banker Reeves boasted of countless posh breakfasts—a “smoked salmon and scrambled eggs offensive”—to schmooze bosses and CEOs. That’s another reference to Blair—his “prawn cocktail offensive” with bankers in the 1990s.
She has met 387 chief executives in the past 18 months and she doesn’t like to describe businesses as “predators”. She agrees with Blair’s friend Peter Mandelson that Labour should be “intensely relaxed about people being filthy rich”. And she thinks “the dynamics of capitalism and business creation and investment are good”.
In contrast, she’s not keen at all on striking workers. “If we were in government, we wouldn’t be on picket lines,” she said. And she definitely won’t promise anyone a real pay rise.
“I have been really clear, as shadow chancellor, that I will not announce anything without saying where the money’s going to come from, so I’m not just going to pluck numbers out of the air,” she said when asked about that.
That’s a lesson she learned from the Tory government of Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng, brought down by bankers last year. The article says that “made it easier for her to convince Labour frontbenchers” against “unfunded spending commitments.”
Unfunded because she also won’t tax the rich—as she insisted repeatedly last week. “I’ve got no intention of doing so,” she said.
Together, Rachel Reeves and Keir Starmer are on a renewed mission to win over bosses and prove they won’t give in to workers’ pay demands. In his own set-piece interview with the Guardian newspaper on Monday, Starmer also insisted Labour “never said that we would introduce wealth taxes.”
Instead, he wanted to force home the message that Labour would be “fiscally disciplined.” It came after a major speech he made last week where he insisted Labour wouldn’t be “getting its big government chequebook out”. “We won’t be able to spend our way out of their mess—it’s not as simple as that.”
Starmer is desperate to make sure nobody expects much from a Labour government. “It’s very important that our message on fiscal discipline is heard,” he said on Monday. “We’re going to inherit a really bad situation. The economy has been really badly damaged over 13 years of low growth.”
So no taxes on the rich, and no pay rises for working class people. But he also insists “I’m against austerity.”
That won’t last long if the bosses demand it. But instead, Starmer is all about “reform” and privatisation—particularly in the NHS.
A Labour government would be “more relaxed about bringing in the expertise” of private businesses to public services, he said in his speech last week. “Communities need strong public services,” he said. “But there’s no substitute for a robust private sector.”
Health workers have reacted with fury after home secretary Suella Braverman instructed them to X-ray child migrants to check their age. Ross McGhee, president of the Society of Radiographers union, said workers should refuse to carry out the tests, which carry risks and should only be used when there is a medical need.
“I would say to any member of the Society of Radiographers that if you are asked to X-ray anyone for any reason, other than a medical benefit, then it’s not justifiable,” he said.
Eager to divert attention from the Tory crisis, Braverman wants to whip up a climate of hate against migrants. She has pledged “robust” age checks on those arriving across the Channel in small boats.
Braverman even has a panel looking at using CT scans and MRI imaging. That’s despite the growing backlog for these services in the NHS. Already 184,000 people in England are waiting three months or more and diagnostic imaging services are “close to failure”.
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