Rachel reeves

Most people went into Work and Pensions Questions expecting Iain Duncan Smith to be in a tetchy fame of mind following this morning’s report on food banks. As a matter of fact, the Work and Pensions Secretary was very, very keen to tell us as often as he possibly could how ‘seriously’ he was taking that report. And the Opposition, which claims to care a lot more about these matters, completely failed to make productive use of its time grilling him. Some Tory ministers were worried that an impending Labour reshuffle at some point this term might see Rachel Reeves moved on to their patch, as she’s deemed very good

Rachel Reeves’ interview on BBC Daily Politics may have been excruciating at times (below), but was it really the ‘car crash’ that the Tories are today claiming? Matthew Hancock is crowing that she pointed out the conditions necessary for reducing debt. She said:- ‘We are planning to get the national debt down, which means you have to be running a surplus to be able to do that. If you are going to have national debt falling you have to have a surplus overall… To get debt falling you have to have a surplus on overall spending.’  Whether wittingly or not, Reeves went further than Ed Balls. She said she wants a

Rachel Reeves, the Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary, gave a speech earlier this week on the future of the welfare system. The choice that she presented was one between ‘…failing programmes and waste driving up social security spending under the Tories’, and Labour’s reforms to ‘…make work pay and get social security spending under control’. To claim that the current government has failed to control benefit spending is a bold tactic from a Labour Party economic spokesperson, and the numbers used to support the argument were so striking that they deserve some scrutiny. Claim One: The Conservatives have spent £13bn more on social security in this parliament than they had

I’ve always admired Jon Cruddas, and worried a little at his being placed at the centre of Ed Miliband’s policy unit. What happens if he talks sense? Well, my fears were well-founded: a good dollop of common sense has emerged from Cruddas, through the medium of today’s Sunday Times splash. On 21 June, we learn, Cruddas was speaking to Compass, a left-wing policy group, and was kind (too kind) about the IPPR’s ‘Condition of Britain’ report – which I’d recommend to conservatives with a taste for schadenfreude as it’s almost comically vacuous and exposes a Labour movement entirely bereft of new ideas. Cruddas was speaking about the report, saying that it took the

Here’s a funny thing: Labour claims to be the ‘party of work’, but the Tories have reasonable claim to be the workers’ party, given that they’ve overseen the creation of 1.5 million new jobs. Anyway, it was one of the slogans that shadow work and pensions secretary Rachel Reeves incanted on her Sunday Politics interview this morning, when she seemed to have a pretty torrid time of it. listen to ‘Rachel Reeves ’ on Audioboo She had to defend her party’s leader against his cratering approval ratings and the embarrassment of a leaked election strategy document which shows that people don’t trust him on immigration, the economy or welfare. And she had

So Rachel Reeves confirmed in the Commons today that Labour will back the welfare cap when it comes to a vote. Tory MPs cheered her as she announced this. There is a rebellion brewing on the Labour benches on this, which party sources are saying they remain ‘vigilant’ about. Some claim that this will be the biggest revolt of Miliband’s leadership. If it is, then it will have to surpass the 40 Labour MPs (39 and one teller) who rebelled against their party’s official position on welfare sanctions just over a year ago. The then Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary Liam Byrne instructed Labour MPs to abstain on a bill

Labour says it is tough on welfare policy. And today, the party launched its tough compulsory jobs guarantee funding pledge by looking tough too. Ed Balls, Ed Miliband and Rachel Reeves would have made a stronger Mr Steerpike quail in these hard-hitting outfits.

Despite promises to be ‘tougher than the Tories’ with regards the welfare bill, shadow work and pensions secretary Rachel Reeves MP was today batting away headlines suggesting that Labour was considering plans to scrap benefits for the under-25s. Reeves’s insistence that neither she, nor the party, support a worthwhile report from the influential, left-of-centre think tank, the IPPR, should raise concern. Not least because the IPPR raised similar points to those of the Prime Minister in his speech at this year’s party conference. In it he outlined plans for an ‘earn or learn’ scheme and recommended that young people are taken out of the welfare system altogether. This is disappointing from a Labour

After insisting that her appointment in no way represented a ‘lurch to the left’ at the weekend by repeating the policy pronouncements that her predecessor was allowed to come out with, Rachel Reeves pitched up at DWP questions today with the same strategy that Liam Byrne had employed when taking on the Tories on welfare. The new shadow Work and Pensions secretary decided to focus not on who was the toughest on welfare, but on the delivery questions that had occupied Byrne towards the end of his tenure. When it came to her turn at topical questions, she rose and said: ‘We on this side of the House support the

More adventures in television from new Newsnight boss Ian Katz. Fresh from his truthful-if-embarrassing slating of Labour’s Rachel Reeves, I hear that Katz has upset another Labour big-wig, Alistair Darling. Apparently, Katz wants to shoot a Scottish referendum debate on a real bridge (presumably the 130-metre Union Bridge in Berwick) between Scotland and England. After the debate, he proposed that members of the audience would ‘vote with their feet’ by walking to either end of the bridge. Darling, who is leading the pro-Union campaign, was not sold on the idea of unionists walking to the English side of river to show their support. PS: Another BBC source says that Katz ‘wanted to