By Jessica Frank-Keyes
Last night, Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves delivered the prestigious Mais Lecture.
She wasn’t the first female Labour shadow Chancellor to make the address, as that honour went to her predecessor Anneliese Dodds.
But with Reeves likely to take up the mantle of the UK’s first female Chancellor, following an election set for later this year, the speech was a key window into her economic thinking.
So, here are five things we learned from the Mais Lecture….
Fiscal rules
Reeves pledged Labour would continue with the Conservatives current fiscal rule that public debt must be falling as a share of the economy by the fifth year of an official forecast.
This is in addition to Labour’s existing fiscal rule not to borrow to fund day-to-day spending, only investment.
She also vowed to end the ability of the Treasury scrapping fiscal rules at any time, and said she would create an “escape clause” meaning that was only possible in an “economic crisis”.
Climate change
The shadow Chancellor said she would reverse Jeremy Hunt’s decision to “downgrade the emphasis put on climate change in the remits for both Bank committees”.
She pledged the Labour government would “reverse these changes, at the first opportunity”, and cited the need for a “serious plan for net zero” in order to secure stability and growth.
Who’s influenced her thinking?
Reeves also namechecked a surprising amount of political and economic figures, giving clues as to who influenced her thinking.
Former Prime Ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, former Chancellor Nigel Lawson, and Australian Treasurer Jim Chalmers – as well as former Bank of England governor Mark Carney, who has endorsed Reeves for Chancellor – all got a name check in her speech.
While British economists Joan Robinson and Jonathan Haskel; Austrian political economist Karl Polanyi, philosopher Bernard Williams; American economist Peter Klenow; Italian academic Oriana Bandiera, and economic historian Claudia Goldin also all made the cut.
The Iron Lady
While Reeves was described as channelling Margaret Thatcher as she argued “as we did at the end of the 1970s, we stand at an inflection point”, the ‘Iron Lady’ was not mentioned in her speech.
Pre-briefed comments indicating Labour wants an “inclusive” version of supply-side reform that sparked Thatcher’s economic revival in the 1970s were criticised by the Labour left.
During a Q&A after the speech, Reeves said she joined Labour “because I disagreed with what so much of what Thatcher did to Britain… I wouldn’t draw the parallels too much.”
She added: “What I’m arguing is that 1979 was a point when the country had to make a big choice.” And she promised voters could expect a “different type of growth”.
Securenomics
Reeves’ stock phrase has been her focus on the link between economics and security, drawn together in the tagline: securenomics.
We are, she argued in a new “age of insecurity, marked first by stalling growth, stagnant living standards and political turbulence and increasingly by global shocks, escalating geopolitical tensions, and the challenges of climate change and the net zero transition”.
She criticised New Labour’s approach, under Blair and Brown, for delivering “stability” but failing to secure “private sector investment”, leaving “weaknesses exposed” during 2008.
Reeves vowed Labour under Starmer would work to “build for growth on strong foundations” with “no trade-off between a more secure and resilient Britain, and a more dynamic Britain”.
