Labour’s grand plan? More borrowing

Rachel Reeves’s speech at Labour party conference was an attempt to show how the party’s economic strategy differs from the Tories. Oddly, the shadow chancellor decided to do this by cherry-picking the showstoppers from both Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak’s highlight reels. 

Reeves’s accusations were numerous, though predominantly levelled at Truss and her disastrous 49-day premiership. ‘When you pay fast and loose with the public finances’, she said, ‘it’s working families that pay that price’ – a sentiment that no doubt resonates with the many households that were acutely affected by the surge in mortgage costs last autumn. The shadow chancellor repeated one of Labour’s favourite, if not misleading, claims that Truss and her chancellor ‘crashed the economy’. This is a fairly easy one for the government to refute: expectations for borrowing costs surged and the pound tumbled, but no recession was triggered by the mini-Budget. Some of her other points, however, will be much harder to rebut.