Previously reserved in her communications style, Chancellor Rachel Reeves has begun rousing people who prefer protecting bats to HS2, and declared herself to be “shouting from the rooftops” about the pent-up wonders of the UK economy.
A lot of the rhetoric in pre-released comments in the run-up to this speech could have come from her Conservative predecessors. From George Osborne, admiration for the Chinese way of ramming through infrastructure projects, while the UK gets caught up on “lunatic” project blocking. And from Jeremy Hunt, the newfound caution on hitting wealthy non-doms on their past earnings or inheritance planning, as she rows back on those plans.
All of this marks a goodbye to “old Rachel”, with those forgettable, cautious, mechanistic speeches about “fixing the foundations of the economy” and a ritual dissing of Liz Truss to make Labour feel better about itself.
This message has landed and “New Rachel” is fierier, more instinctive than her previous presentation as a senior chess player who could plot out sequential moves and anticipate what would follow. That did not prevent her imposing a tax on non-doms, based on the assumption that they are so attached to living in Britain that they would swallow paying levies on income and capital gains earnings overseas and a wallop on inheritance tax on their assets in trust.
The real reason for the volte-face is the clash between her desire for high spenders with dual (at least) residences, to stay in London, list companies on the London stock exchange or get venture capital into the AI and green tech companies she is boasting about, rather than head off to favourable tax regimes in competitor countries.
The UK is about to see the benefits of Brexit
Read MoreThe prospect of dealing with legal repercussions when new staff leave a job shortly after hiring worries a lot of owners, and a more phased approach might have caused less avoidable angst. When Rupert Soames, the CBI boss, tells me that “the Government has lost the trust of business”, the clash between that judgement and call for boosterism can rebound. The fundamentals need to be sorted before the cheerleading can be convincing.
It is also, as she privately conceded last week, not enough to blame Brexit for bigger problems the country needs to address – and to which shadowing tattered European industrial policies won’t much help. Ideally there would be a reconnection of the UK to Europe for trade purposes, as Europe faces chilly trading headwinds with the US. But Reeves can only engage when there is appetite in Europe to do so and that will not be fast.
It won’t happen without some blood being spilt on the No 11 carpet – and some of it, I confidently predict, will be ministerial.
Anne McElvoy is host of the Power Play podcast for POLITICO
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