She is a toughie with the most thankless job in Britain and Rachel Reeves is now also the dark Angel of Cuts.
Wednesday’s financial statement is expected to be bleak with growth down, borrowing up, living standards forecast to fall, key public services slashed and hope for radical change vanishing outside the NHS.
Grim, grim, grim, grim, grim, grim and a world away from General Election dreams of advances from blood, sweat and tears with those callous welfare cuts a sign of worse to come.
The Chancellor the Exchequer was undoubtedly bequeathed a dire Tory inheritance, Labour forever selling a £20billion Tory black hole.
Donald Trump exploding in the White House is another heavy blow, the US loose cannon turning his fire on allies as damaging to European democracies as official enemy Vladimir Putin.
But an orthodox Chancellor refusing to think outside the box is Treasury business as usual when this is surely a moment for radical thinking.
In Germany even a Conservative leader, Friedrich Merz, is rewriting fiscal rules to invest in defence and vital infrastructure.
Here in Britain a Labour Government is stitched into a straitjacket slashing benefits at home and aid abroad.
The danger is the UK will continue to be trapped in a vortex of decline, families becoming poorer and public services worsening rather than improving with the exception of health.
Labour boxed itself in on Income Tax, VAT and employees’ National Insurance rises and is spooked by the backlash over a NI hike for employers and cut-price Inheritance Tax on feather-bedded farmers and landowners.
Reeves is shutting her ears to daring solutions proposed by Labour and Green MPs, trade unionists, assorted Left-wingers and campaigners thinking outside the box.
The 2% wealth tax on 20,000 worth over £10million each could raise up to £24billion, claim champions from Diane Abbott and Richard Burgon to lobby groups Tax Justice UK and Patriotic Millionaires UK, plus charity Oxfam.
Reeves flirted in opposition with a single rate of pensions tax relief that would end the injustice of nearly two-thirds, £27billion of £43bn, going to the minority earning above the 20p basic rate of Income Tax.
Capital Gains Tax remains lower than Income Tax, another injustice when unearned income should be taxed at the same rate or arguably a higher rate than earned income.
The Chancellor can quibble about how much could be raised from fresh taxes, but unless Reeves is bold the immediate future is dispiriting.
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Super-rich hereditary monarch King Charles III paying less council tax on Buckingham Palace than the owner of an average-sized home in, say, Blackpool or Sunderland is a broken system.
OK, Chas will also contribute business rates, but a typical North East England household charged a record £444 more than somebody in central London is indefensible.
Basing bills on 1991 property prices in England, a time when Chesney Hawkes topped the charts with The One and Only and Mikhail Gorbachev was President of the Soviet Union, is ludicrous and why urgent reform is required.
Yet Labour, like the Tory and ConDem coalition Governments before them, are frightened to change because losers would out-shout winners.
The Labour MP for Easington in County Durham, Grahame Morris, warns with some justification that council tax is now “even more regressive” than Thatcher’s poll tax.
Bills up 5% in many areas is because council tax is a basket case tax.
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Brexit, identified by the respected Nuffield Trust health thinktank as a key reason drug shortages are the worst for four years – epilepsy and cystic fibrosis medicines among 1,938 reported problems – unsurprisingly is something not shouted about by con artists who in 2016 missold Britain quitting the EU.
More surprising is silence from a pro-European UK Labour Government when the ill effects of disrupting supply lines should be pinned on Farage, Badenoch, Johnson and the rest so nobody believes another lie they tell.
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Coming over here and scoring our goals, Premier League football stars who’d be deported under Kemi Badenoch’s latest migration PR guff show aping Reform will be another Tory own goal.
Newcastle’s Brazilian colossus Joelinton would’ve been exiled after drink-driving in 2023 and Chelsea’s £107m Argentine midfielder Enzo Fernandez last year over a driving ban for two offences.
Vowing to boot out all foreign nationals convicted of offences, even if not jailed, isn’t a crowd pleaser when voters stop and think.
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Nigel Farage boasted Reform rejects “lots”, 35%, of people who want to stand for the Hard Right anti-migrant party. What slippery Nige should be asking himself is why another party he heads attracts so many “fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists”, as David Cameron called them.
POINTS OF DISORDER
Britain can’t afford NOT to take carbon out of energy when net zero will save us money by about 2040 according to London School of Economics analysis ignored by fossil fuels screaming we’re doomed.
The 2050 net zero goal is also popular, Badenoch again on the wrong side of public opinion when a YouGov poll after the U-turning Tory leader pulled the plug on past support found 61% back axing carbon emissions by then.
It’s why Labour sticking with green plans would be smart. The noisy fossil fuels in the Conservative and Reform parties, by the way, are largely the same Right-whinge hucksters who orchestrated the Brexit disaster
British politicians could learn from Canada’s new PM Mark Carney over how to handle Donald Trump.
The former Bank of England governor’s “elbows up” approach, using aggressive ice hockey tactics, is better than lying down and letting the US madman walk all over us.
Starmer and Reeves cut or axe the £800m digital services tax on tech giants to appease Elon Musk and Trump and it’ll be the UK, not Canada, that becomes the USA’s 51st state.
GOING UP
Voted most popular Cabinet Minister by Labour’s grassroots, Energy Secretary Ed Miliband will use the Heathrow power cut to hammer home why Britain’s electricity network must be upgraded after decades of neglect.
GOING DOWN
Tory culture spokesman Stuart Andrew is an embarrassing dad dancer for moaning punk duo Lambrini Girls received a few bob to promote Britain abroad because the MP objects to one song slagging off Thatcher. Get a life, Stu.
SPEAKER’S CORNER
“Many people in Florida and Texas speak Spanish but it would be idiotic and offensive to claim that they belong to Spain. Ukrainian territory belongs to the Ukrainian state alone.”
Labour MP Neil Coyle nailed Trump’s Ukraine special envoy Steve Witkoff, an ignorant billionaire property developer spouting Kremlin propaganda to justify Putin’s occupation of areas with Russian speakers. Vlad the Invader can’t believe his White House luck.
