Labour’s economic plan? Reheated Miliband

Rachel Reeves is, as Labour frontbenchers go, pretty experienced. She’s not been in government, but then neither has her leader because there are now young teenagers who have never experienced a Labour government. Reeves has been on and off her party’s frontbench ever since she was elected in 2010, and that long experience was on show in her response this afternoon to the spring statement – in both good and bad ways.

This was one of the more confident responses I’ve watched from a Labour frontbencher to an economic statement over their 12 years of opposition. Reeves had a really clever section where she mocked the difference between Rishi Sunak’s reality and what life is like for everyone else by telling the tale of ‘Alice in Sunakland’, where ‘nothing here is quite as it seems’. She told the chamber: 

In Sunakland, the Chancellor proclaims ‘I believe in lower taxes’, while at the same time hiking Alice’s National Insurance contributions.