I quickly came up with a dozen. Reeves has “misspoke” about everything from her tax plans to her days as a dazzling child chess prodigy, and they’re unravelling, one by one. So here goes.
Winter Fuel Payment. After the pensioner backlash over scrapping the Winter Fuel Payment, Reeves claimed she really didn’t want to cut it but was forced to do so. Yet Parliamentary footage from 2014 shows her boasting about her plans to axe it way back in 2014, as evidence she could make “tough decisions”.
National Insurance. During the election Reeves repeatedly claimed Labour wouldn’t hike taxes on « working people », primarily income tax, national insurance (NI) and VAT.
Yet in her Budget she hiked NI on employers to the tune of £25billion, and they’re passing on the cost by firing staff, reducing pay rises or pushing up prices. All of this hits working people.
Tax attack. In campaign mode, Reeves stated that higher taxes were unnecessary and emphasised the need for growth. She then went onto launch the biggest tax raid since 1993 in her autumn Budget. Incredibly, she’s since distanced herself from her own promises.
Economic “black hole”. Reeves only claimed to have discovered her famous £22billion « black hole » in the nation’s books after the election, and used it as an excuse for tax hikes. Yet as Paul Johnson, head of the independent Institute for Fiscal Studies pointed out: “That fact was obvious to all who cared to look.”
Her brilliant career (part 1). Reeves claims she was an economist at Halifax-owner HBOS bank. She was forced to edit her CV on LinkedIn after it turned out she was actually “running a small administrative complaints department that also dealt with IT matters”.
Her brilliant career (part 2). Reeves claimed in 2021 that « I spent a decade working as an economist at the Bank of England and loved it”. In truth, she spent just five-and-a-half years there. Which included a year out studying.
VAT on private school fees. The Chancellor told broadcasters “every single penny” of the £1.5billion generated by slapping VAT on private school fees would go towards state education. In fact, the money just goes into the general pool of taxation.
Her brilliant literary career (part 1). Reeves claimed to have published work in the highly prestigious Journal of Political Economy. However, we now know it appeared in the lesser known European Journal of Political Economy. And was co-written.
Her brilliant literary career (part 2). Reeves’s book The Women Who Made Modern Economics contains more than 20 instances of plagiarism, as she stole entire sentences and paragraphs without credit, according to the Financial Times.
Her brilliant chess career. Among her many brilliant achievements, Reeves somehow found time to become “the British girls under-14 champion”. It’s true she played in the British Under 14 championship, website Guido Fawkes discovered. But she came 26th. And 29th the year before, in the Under 13s. Some prodigy.
Expenses scandal (part 1): In 2015, Reeves’s official credit card was suspended by the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (IPSA) after she claimed £4,033.63 in invalid expenses. That was the third-highest sum among the MPs involved. This from a woman who claims she knows how to run a £2.7trillion economy.
Expenses scandal (part 2). A bombshell BBC exposé revealed that a whistleblower reported Reeves to bosses accusing her of spending hundreds of pounds on handbags, perfume, earrings and wine while at HBOS. The Chancellor denies all knowledge. As yet, we don’t know if she’s telling the truth, but her track record isn’t good.
Perhaps the most impressive thing about Rachel Reeves’s CV is that she’s kept her job as Chancellor for a full seven months. But if her Spring Statement on March 26 reveals yet more fanciful thinking, she could be gone.
I wonder how her CV will describe her disastrous stint at No 11? Brilliant, dazzling, highly praised, world-changing….
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