Rachel Reeves tries to reverse Labour's economic gloom

As expected, Rachel Reeves used her big – and long – growth speech this morning to back the expansion of Heathrow and argue that Britain was taking too long to make decisions on building infrastructure, let alone getting it done. The Chancellor did devote large passages of her speech to criticising the ‘structural problems in our economy’, and to blaming the Conservatives, but she was clearly trying not to make the whole thing about what her predecessors had got wrong. This speech had to be about how Labour was going to grow the economy, after months of criticism that Reeves and Keir Starmer are taking the wrong approach. Reeves said there was ‘no alternative to restoring economic stability’ but the path she was on, and that ‘the costs of irresponsibility would have been far higher’.