What the Autumn Statement means for Labour

Labour’s Rachel Reeves won plaudits for her immediate takedown of Chancellor Jeremy Hunt’s Autumn Statement, which she labelled “an invoice for the economic carnage the government has created”.

The shadow chancellor was widely praised for her response to Hunt’s announcement – which featured tax hikes and spending cuts – as well as to Kwasi Kwarteng’s disastrous mini-budget back in September. “Not since Gordon Brown faced off against Ken Clarke in the early 1990s has a Labour shadow chancellor been so effective at dismantling the Tory economic record,” said Patrick O’Flynn in The Spectator.

If Hunt’s austerity-driven Autumn Statement was a test to see whether or not Reeves is a viable chancellor-in-waiting, she “comprehensively passed it”, he added.

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But the party and Reeves’s quickwitted dismantling of Hunt’s plan “leaves something big on the table: a positive vision of what Labour would do differently”, said Archie Bland in The Guardian’s Friday morning briefing.

“Reeves’s speech yesterday was full of punchy lines,” Bland continued, “but they were more focused on making the government sound like bungling, venal morons than advancing a different theory of the economy.”

An editorial in the same paper agreed, saying that “Labour is not offering any competition for people’s thinking”.

‘Hallmarks of a Labour budget’

Perhaps one reason why Labour has not offered an opposing plan is that “Hunt’s autumn statement had all the hallmarks of a Labour budget”, said Beth Rigby, Sky News’s political editor. With the UK’s tax burden now at its highest point since the Second World War, Rigby argued that Hunt’s latest fiscal plan “borrowed much from the opposition front bench”.

Last Sunday, just four days before Hunt’s statement, Reeves announced that Labour would extend the windfall tax and raise capital gains tax. Hunt announced iterations of both of these ideas, with tax hikes in the form of threshold freezes and an increase to the windfall tax on energy companies. Such were the similarities between the two chancellors’ visions that one senior economist told Rigby that the Conservatives had “shot Labour’s fox”.

Writing for The Spectator, Isabel Hardman agreed with Rigby, stating that Hunt’s measures “weren’t a million miles away from what you’d expect from Labour in these circumstances”. Like O’Flynn, Hardman was impressed by the “mix of cold fury and jokes” with which Reeves assessed Hunt’s economic announcements.

But, added Hardman, “Labour shouldn’t just congratulate itself”. Instead, the party must hammer home its criticisms “until Westminster gets bored of them and voters are picking up on them”.

Fresh calls for a general election

Despite similarities between Hunt’s budget and Labour policy, opposition MPs took yesterday’s statement as an opportunity to call for an early general election – and a Labour government. “It’s time to break free from [the Conservative Party’s] vicious cycle,” said deputy leader Angela Rayner, while Jarrow MP Kate Osborne tweeted that “we need a #GeneralElectionNow so we can start to fix this mess”.

But opposition MPs stopped short of announcing policies or stating how their plan for government would differ from the approach taken by Rishi Sunak’s recently formed Tory cabinet.

‘Poisoned chalice’

Should Labour be returned to power following the next election, the party will inherit a “poisoned chalice”, said Chloe Chaplain on the i news site. “Under the current projections”, Hunt’s statement could commit Keir Starmer to “considerable public cuts in his first years in office”, leaving the Labour leader in a “difficult position”, she wrote.

Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Friday morning, Reeves said her party “will not be able to do everything we want as quickly as we want” because of the “mistakes the Tories have made”.

But when challenged by presenter Mishal Husain on the steps Labour would take once in office, Reeves “refused to spell out” what the party would “scale back” in its own spending plans, reported Oli Smith in the Daily Express.