Rachel Reeves has all the makings of another terrible British chancellor

‘Labour has clocked on to the fact that promises around the state pension are vote winners’

Barring some kind of miracle for the Tories, Rachel Reeves will be Britain’s next chancellor. Whether this is good or bad news, we do not know. However, the early signs are not good.

So far, the shadow chancellor has been big on talk but thin on details.

Those who follow her on Twitter have been informed that Labour’s plan is to make “working people better off ”. Reeves has also said: “Good jobs paying decent wages and lower bills. That will be my ambition as chancellor.” That’s all well and good, and the incumbent government would love to do all that too, I’m sure. But former Bank of England economist Reeves must know that things aren’t that simple.

Labour has also this week positioned itself as the party of pensioners.

After promising to stick to the ever-so- expensive triple lock promise, Reeves said there was no “justification” to raise the state pension age any higher – despite repeated warnings that something will have to give.

Labour has obviously clocked on to the fact that promises around the state pension are vote winners, after all it worked for the Tories for years. But the problem for Reeves is these promises are very hard to keep. New Labour promised in its 1997 manifesto there would be “no increase in the basic or top rates of income tax”.

Gordon Brown, then chancellor, went on to cut tax relief on mortgage interest and private healthcare, before increasing stamp duty rates and the top rate of income tax.

The point is that chancellors, and their shadow counterparts, know full well that the job is just as much about politics as it is economics. Votes are bought using promises made with taxpayers’ cash. It’s a thankless job, really.

You have to give from one hand and take from another, for every winner, there is a loser. Yet the best chancellors should be honest about that.

Reeves has been particularly vocal about the Conservatives’ plan to put an end to National Insurance once and for all – warning that it will create a £46bn hole in state pension and NHS funding.

Jeremy Hunt, the Chancellor, retorted by accusing her of “scaremongering”. He said: “The value of NICs (National Insurance Contributions) receipts do not determine the NHS budget or the value of pensions. Those decisions are taken entirely separately.”

The Tories have done some stupid things but to pull the plug on state pension funding would be something else.

The folly of most modern-day chancellors is to think that the public are stupid and don’t know what they are up to. Hunt and Rishi Sunak’s stealth tax raid has fooled no one. Labour is perhaps only winning votes and leading polls because the nation is so sick of a Conservative party that has squandered more than a decade of power. From now until the election, there’ll be plenty of promises of where money will be spent, but little on where that money will come from.

To get a true picture of what kind of a chancellor Reeves will be, we need her to put political posturing aside, and give some frank and honest answers about what she intends to do as Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Until then, it is reasonable for us to fear the worst.