Labour to copy Biden’s spending splurge

LABOUR will embrace US strategies as a blueprint for fixing the economy, Rachel Reeves said yesterday as she was accused of resurrecting ‘old’ economic ideas of spending and borrowing.

The Shadow Chancellor said Britain would pursue ‘securonomics’, ensuring greater certainty. She insisted her party would not seek to ‘become a British version of America’, but lay out a new industrial strategy.

Praising US President Joe Biden during her speech in Washington yesterday, she said the UK must ‘rebuild the industrial foundations that we have lost and which has left us exposed to global shocks’.

Labour’s green investment plans echo Mr Biden’s $500billion Inflation Reduction Act, which invests in domestic energy production. But critics suggested she was just reheating the ‘same old Labour ideas’ of even more spending and borrowing.

Mrs Reeves said: ‘I will chart a new economic course for Britain. It begins by accepting that the world has changed and Britain must change with it.’ Citing a new deal between Britain and the US, she added: ‘Labour will build a new special relationship, and it will be a green special relationship focusing on the clean energy economy.’

But Tory party chairman Greg Hands said: ‘While Rachel Reeves is talking down Britain, we are growing the economy and cutting inflation here in the UK.

‘Labour’s plan to stick £28billion a year on the country’s credit card shows Labour haven’t really changed. All they are proposing is the same old Labour ideas of more spending and borrowing. We will take no lectures from Labour, who always leave the economy in a worse state.’

Labour’s newly released economic strategy claims the UK is ‘well placed to thrive in new industries, like clean energy and AI’.

Mrs Reeves confirmed the party would try to get a better deal with Brussels when the UK-EU agreement is up for review in 2025.

‘While there’s no going back into the single market or the customs union, with Labour we would make trade easier with Europe, and rebuild ties with our closest neighbours,’ she said.