Chancellor Rachel Reeves also insisted she is ‘here for the long haul’ and said she would not allow her critics, who have called for her to resign, to ‘get me down’
Rachel Reeves has said she’s happy to be branded an “Iron Chancellor” – after surviving her most turbulent week in No11.
The Chancellor also insisted she is “here for the long haul” and said she would not allow her critics, who have called for her to resign, to “get me down”. It follows a bruising week for Ms Reeves who has faced intense pressure in recent days amid a surge in borrowing costs and the value of the pound slumping.
She told the BBC’s Political Thinking podcast: “I haven’t taken it personally this week, it’s political. Some people don’t want me to succeed. There’s some people who don’t want this government to succeed. That’s fair enough. That is their prerogative. But I’m not going to let them get me down.
“I’m not going to let them stop me from doing what this government has a mandate to do and that’s to grow the economy and make working people better off.”
Pressed on whether she was happy to be described as the “Iron Chancellor”, she replied: “If people want to describe me as that – but I will make the right decisions. I’m happy to be the Iron Chancellor, if that’s what you want to call me.”
Ms Reeves also made clear she would not U-turn on any measures announced at last year’s Budget. She said: “When people said these are the wrong decisions, you should reverse them, I stuck to my guns because I knew if we started reversing those decisions that were necessary to get the public finances back in order we’d be back in the situation that the Tories got into… where the sums didn’t add up.
“So I stuck to my guns, I showed that steely determination that I think a Chancellor needs to make the decisions in the national interest.”
Ms Reeves also defended controversial decisions during her first six months, including scrapping the winter fuel payment for millions of pensioners and rejecting compensation for the WASPI women.
She told the BBC : “I’ve already made some difficult decisions. We have said that unless you are on pension credit, we can’t afford to pay the winter fuel payment anymore. We haven’t compensated women who were affected by the changes in the state pension age.
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“We’ve said to farmers you will have to pay for the first time since the 1990s inheritance tax. I don’t think anyone can say Rachel is not able to make difficult decisions. Those are just three that we’ve made in six months because they were the right decisions in the national interest.”
And she brushed off comparisons with ex-Tory PM Liz Truss, whose mini-Budget caused mayhem in the markets and her exit from No10 after just 49 days, saying: “Every decision I make has consequences, but so does the counterfactual.
“If I had made the decision not to address those very real pressures, then this is the consequence: borrowing costs would have gone through the roof. Borrowing costs not just for the Government but for families and businesses, like it did when Liz Truss was Prime Minister.”
She added: “I’m here for the long haul. I’m here to make the right decisions in the country’s national interest, not the easy decisions, not the quick fixes, not sweeping things under the carpet, but the right decisions to put our economy on a firm footing.”
