Labour avidly disagrees with the Tories’ plan to fill budget gaps by hiking National Insurance. So what would they do differently? This was one of the many tasks Rachel Reeves had today as the shadow chancellor delivered her speech at Labour party conference. Reeves not only had to set out an alternative tax-and-spend policy but also take aim at the financial decisions made by Boris Johnson’s government.
Did Reeves succeed? No doubt her job was made much easier over the weekend as an energy crisis, which the government should have seen coming, continued to splash across the front pages, exacerbated by fuel shortages at the pumps brought on by a lack of truck drivers. There are indeed ‘snaking queues at petrol stations,’ as Reeves suggested, and the government is ‘having to issue reassurances that it can even keep the lights on’. Even if the situation isn’t as dire as some of the headlines suggest, it is a far from ideal set of circumstances for the reigning party to be entering ahead of the conference season.
It’s nearly impossible for Labour to go hard on the Tories for their spending
But the crucial questions for the future of Labour weren’t answered.
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