What does Rachel Reeves stand for?

As the world discovered when she was caught lifting other people’s work for her book on women in economics, Rachel Reeves is not the most original of thinkers. But she has political talents. She has cultivated her image as an uninspiring technocrat in order to present herself as someone who will not spring surprises or take risks as chancellor. She thinks the state is inefficient and taxes are too high. She believes in ‘securonomics’, which sounds like a pleasing contrast to years of Tory policies.

It is easy to preach fiscal discipline, but in office Labour would find it very difficult to contain spending

Polls show that voters now think Labour are more likely to lower taxes than the Conservatives, so Reeves has already achieved something significant. And when it comes to plagiarism, the Tories are the ones copying her. Windfall tax on North Sea oil? Check. Abolishing non-dom status? Check. Expanding the state, so the taxpayer covers childcare costs for the well-off? Check. This is why Reeves was named Chancellor of the Year at the 2022 Spectator Parliamentarian awards, beating the four Tory candidates who had actually held the job. She is already making the intellectual running.

She has few hard policies at present. This is perhaps understandable, given the short space of time between her proposing an idea and the Tories adopting it – but her strategy is more verbal than practical. She seeks to use language usually associated with the right (stability, investment, risk-taking) to reheat the state-intervention model of the pre-Blair Labour party. This was at the heart of her Mais lecture in London this week.

Britain, she said, is ‘stumbling blindfolded into an era of a bigger state’ with the highest tax burden for 70 years. It’s true. But she has nothing in the way of remedy. She reiterated Labour’s intention to repeal all trade union reforms since 2010.