Rachel Reeves may not be the most mellifluous writer ever to inhabit 11 Downing Street. At the weekend, she informed readers of the Mail on Sunday that she would ‘make no apology for keeping an iron grip on the country’s finances’ but was happy to spend money on training more ‘brickies, sparkies and chippies’. The lurch from cliché to fake colloquialism does not suggest Reeves will be bracketed with Disraeli, Gladstone, Churchill or Lawson. But there is one addition to the political lexicon for which Reeves is responsible and which deserves a revival – ‘securonomics’.
Before Labour’s election, the term was never far from Reeves’s lips. Launched with great fanfare in Washington, it was defined in her Mais lecture last year as ‘not the big state but the smart and strategic state’ – an attempt, inspired by Joe Biden, to use government spending to leverage long-term investment in domestic production. It was a response to a world in which globalisation was in retreat, the neo-liberal economic settlement of the Blair years was no longer viable, and a new growth strategy based on improving domestic productivity was required. It offered hope of a thoughtful response to a world in which, after Covid and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, resilience, re-shoring and re-industrialisation were newly important.
Once Reeves made it into No. 11, ‘securonomics’ disappeared. Instead of developing a coherent new political economy, the Chancellor politicised every economic argument. Attacks on the ‘£22 billion black hole’ the Conservatives allegedly left in the public finances replaced arguments about appropriate reforms in a more dangerous world.
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