Rachel Reeves gave the Mais speech to City suits in mid-March. I’ll post further on that but James Meadway on X @meadwaj has correctly made the headline point. Namely that Reeves plans a departure from neo0-liberalism with the State regulating the market to some extent. At the same time she is sticking with austerity (which was hardly news, and remains highly problematic).
The Murdoch owned Times opined on Reeves speech on 23rd March. The Times runs quite frequent Editorials claiming Labour has no policies, and while those of us on the left might agree, what the paper means is it doesnt have enough policies that Rupert Murdoch likes.
The Editorial claims Reeves will be the first Chancellor in generations to enter Government with an industrial strategy. The Times is not great at history. The Labour Governments of 1974-79 certainly had industrial strategies. It can be argued this was two generations ago. However Blair also had one even if it was PFI, which one suspects is also part of Reeves strategy too. Of course Reeves is concerned with employers only here not all who work in industry
The Editorial particularly dislikes the plan for the State to regulate privateers (although the Tories reluctantly do this as well). It moans about the idea that the ‘private sector needs to be cajoled or supplanted into meeting social needs’ even though anyone who has used a train in recent times will understand what nonsense that line is.
Finally, a favourite subject, the Times moans about Labour’s plans for workers rights which apparently are to please the Party’s ‘militant paymasters’. They mean unions not businessmen by the way.
It might have helped here if the Editorial writer had actually read Reeves speech where she underlined that the reason for repealing Tory employment laws passed since 2010 is that they had actually created more industrial strife and therefore damaged not promoted the economy.
Expect a lot more on all these points from Murdoch before the Election even if the front page of the S*n (23rd March)suggests that the pivot to supporting Starmer is already in progress
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