Rachel Reeves: Starmer’s new ‘de-facto’ deputy

Labour’s Rachel Reeves has argued that “boring” government is the way to boost the UK’s growth as she urged Chancellor Jeremy Hunt to resist “siren” calls to cut corporation tax.

In a speech to the Make UK manufacturing industry conference this week, the shadow chancellor argued that the way out of the country’s “enduring economic malaise” was through a stable government with targeted incentives for business investment, and argued that predictability was better than low taxes.

“You may say it’s boring but I think most businesses here would say it’s time to see a bit of stability after the last few years of chaos and confusion,” she told the conference.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

“Three prime ministers, four chancellors, four budgets in just one year – it’s sort of a joke, but it’s not funny for businesses who are trying to make long-term decisions,” she said.

Reeves has made several appearances in the media in recent months, largely because it seems she is in lockstep with Labour leader Keir Starmer on a number of key issues. The shadow chancellor is a former Bank of England economist and it “is ultimately Reeves’ CV, the subtext of which is Starmerism distilled, that has foisted the shadow chancellor over [Angela] Rayner into Labour’s de facto number two spot”, said Politics.co.uk.

Who is Rachel Reeves?

“Labour runs through her blood,” wrote The Mirror. Reeves joined the party aged just 16, while her sister, Ellie Reeves, and her brother-in-law, John Cryer, are also Labour MPs.

Reeves joined the party shortly before Labour’s landslide victory in 1997, and was inspired by the “Blair’s babes” generation of women in the party, she told The New Statesman. “That was the first time there were women MPs we could relate to,” she told the magazine. “They were dressed normally, they were young, they looked like modern women who were about ten years older than me and I thought ‘this is something I could do’.”

Brought up in Lewisham, southeast London, Reeves attended her local state school and her parents, Sally and Graham, were both teachers. As a child she was a highly competitive chess player, winning her first match at seven and becoming a national champion aged 14.

Reeves went on to read philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford University and then took a master’s in economics at LSE. Before becoming an MP, Reeves worked as an economist at the Bank of England, as well as at the British embassy in Washington, and at Halifax Bank of Scotland.

Reeves was “earmarked as a ‘rising star’ in the Labour Party from the moment she was elected in 2010”, said Alibhe Rea, also in The New Statesman. Under Ed Miliband, she was appointed the shadow pensions minister just six months after becoming the MP for Leeds West. But she would spend years in the political wilderness during the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn – with whom she had significant ideological differences – and resigned to the backbenches after a period of maternity leave.

Under Starmer, she served as the shadow chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster between 2020 and 2021, before being appointed shadow chancellor in May 2021.

Starmer’s de facto deputy

Reeves was once described as “boring snoring” by a disgruntled television executive after a wooden Newsnight performance, but many believe she is now well on her way to becoming the UK’s first female chancellor if the Labour Party maintains its lead in the polls.

She has seemingly become indispensable to Starmer of late, noted Politics.co.uk. “When Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer touched down in snowy Davos this January, ready to schmooze business leaders in the Swiss Alps, he did not disembark alone,” but was “flanked by his shadow chancellor and trusty treasury sidekick, Rachel Reeves”.

The “Davos double-act” was a further signal of the pair’s “political affinity”, said the news site, adding: “the nearer British politics edges to an election expected in late 2024, the more inseparable Reeves and Starmer appear”.

And the fallout from Liz Truss’s disastrous mini-budget in September gave Reeves her “most significant boost” to date. Starmer knows that his shadow chancellor’s “stolidity in the face of the Conservative government’s frequent fiscal do-overs presents Labour with the perfect optics” and hopes her “continued presence” opposite four Conservative chancellors has created “a sense of elusive political continuity and policy dependability”.

Tax review plans

Following reports that Chancellor Jeremy Hunt will refuse to bow to backbench demands to row back on plans to increase corporation tax in next week’s Spring Budget, Labour has said it will support the hike.

But Reeves used her speech on Thursday to promise a comprehensive review of the UK’s tax regime “as the party tries to shore up its economic credentials ahead of the next election”, said Politico.

According to Reeves, the review will look at “a roadmap for tax which lasts over a parliament”, and weigh up whether the UK’s “current system of capital allowances is fit for purpose in its design and operation, including for small businesses who are crucial for growth”.

Criticising the plans, Conservative Party chairman Greg Hands said: “We don’t need Labour to do a tax review to know that they’d put taxes up on business. Corporation tax remains lower than it was at any point of the last Labour government.”