In an analysis of Rachel Reeves’s Spending Review, The Mirror’s Lizzy Buchan says the Chancellor’s speech was designed to draw a line under a tricky first year in power
Rachel Reeves has splashed the cash in a Spending Review designed to draw a line under a tricky first year in power.
The Chancellor cast aside the gloom of her early months in office and instead pledged to put billions of pounds into public services and to get spades in the ground across Britain.
She alluded to Labour’s biggest problem – that voters who handed them a landslide victory don’t yet feel the change they were promised. This impatience for change is fuelling a rise in support for Nigel Farage and his crew of snake oil salesmen.
Ms Reeves made it clear that she’s getting on with it, with a flurry of announcements for big ticket projects such as public transport, nuclear power and affordable homes. She also had a message for Labour supporters, who feel let down by some of the decisions the Government has made.
Pointing to her long list of announcements, she hammered home the point that these are “Labour choices” – and they are. Pouring cash into boosting the NHS, fixing crumbling school buildings, firing up public transport projects and getting Britain building is definitely back in Labour territory.
Let’s not forget free school meals for more children and restoring the winter fuel allowance to millions of pensioners.
But while there are winners, there are also losers. Police chiefs are warning they may have to make cuts due to a squeeze on Home Office funding.
Schools face a real-terms freeze in budgets once cash for free school meals expansion is stripped away, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies.
Some departments, including Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, and Culture, Media and Sport, are facing outright cuts.
It’s also not clear how the UK will get to its ambition of spending 3% of GDP on defence, which is already miles behind the 5% NATO chief Mark Rutte wants allies to sign up to.
And swingeing welfare cuts have been factored in, despite fury from Labour MPs at plans to cut disability benefits.
All this spending has already been accounted for in the Budget and the Spring Statement. But with the finances so tight, Ms Reeves will continue to face questions over whether she may be forced to put up taxes again in the autumn.