For the first time in a long time, Rachel Reeves looked happy. The Conservative benches tried their best to damage her. They mock-laughed whenever she mentioned an economic improvement. They jeered whenever she revealed a forecast. But it all sounded flimsy and unconvincing. She had a spring in her step and they could see it.
The Chancellor mocked the Tories for their economic record – basically shooting fish in a barrel. Then she looked to her right and turned on Nigel Farage, or rather she would have done if he’d bothered to turn up. So instead she attacked the Conservative MPs who now populate the Reform benches. “The same people, the same policies and the same disastrous outcomes for working people,” she barked across the Chamber.
She looked confident, steady and in control. And there was a good reason for that. She was finally delivering on the core pledge Labour made to the public when it came to power.
One of Keir Starmer’s greatest promises in opposition was boredom: beautiful, elegant, reassuring boredom. A return to a world of politics which normal people could sensibly ignore.
We had undergone nearly a decade of drama – Brexit, Partygate, the mini-Budget meltdown, an endless cycle of crazed prime ministers treating No 10 like an AirBnB. But the Labour leader seemed to offer something else: a stable period of dull, dutiful competence. A good night’s sleep after a horrible party.
He has since proved utterly unable to deliver on that promise. No matter how staid his appearance, he somehow manages to create more chaos than he solves. But today, not before time, the Chancellor took the first faltering steps towards fulfilling Starmer’s old pledge.
Today’s Spring Statement was an absolute snooze-fest. A moribund, dead-on-arrival snore-a-thon. It was the political equivalent of a five hour experimental modern dance performance, the kind of show you’re dragged to by your partner and know with utter certainty will leave you comatosed. And that right there is the most lavish praise we can offer it.
There is no greater triumph in economic policy than being utterly boring. Spring Statements should be of no consequence to anyone, except perhaps a few fund managers and whoever is tasked with filing the bottom of the fifth page of the Financial Times.
Initially, it seemed as if Reeves understood this. When she came to power she pledged to reduce the number of flagship economic events to one per annum – the Budget, and only the Budget. The Spring Statement would logically drift into irrelevance.
This is the correct approach. The more numerous your economic events, the more tax policies you have to invent to populate them. This eventually creates a system of impossible complexity which no-one really understands. It ties up people’s economic lives in a series of tax policies which were designed to win headlines on Budget day decades ago years ago – a ruinous form of economic suffocation which is at least partly responsible for our sluggish economic performance.
Instead, Reeves aimed to slow down the wheel. Less policy meant more stability, which meant more growth.
But last year’s Spring Statement failed to live up to that promise. It was a horror show of unforced errors. The Chancellor hadn’t left herself enough money to satisfy her fiscal rule. This forced her to scribble down some plans to reform welfare on the back of a matchstick box, just to make the sums add up.
It was grubby, cynical, amateurish stuff. Labour MPs sniffed the amoral instincts underneath it all and forced the leadership to U-turn.
That Spring Statement was very far away from boring. It was – and I mean this in the most damning way possible – interesting. It was a masterclass in how not to conduct economic policy.
This is why today was such an impressive event. It was unutterably dull. It was the kind of normal healthy economic event you have in a normal healthy country. And that was not the result of cyclical forces or fortunate trade winds. It was the result of a concerted effort by Reeves.
The Chancellor boosted her headroom in the Budget sufficiently so that she didn’t have to come back for more today. She altered the economic timetable so that the OBR only assessed performance against the fiscal rule once a year, rather than twice. This prevented any of the embarrassing Excel-document-fiddling we saw with welfare reform last year.
In the background, the economy is still in a state of nervous tension. The unemployment rate was raised from an expected peak of 4.9 per cent to 5.3 per cent. Growth forecasts were down slightly next year, then up in the years afterwards.
Elsewhere there were several modest signs of economic improvement. Inflation was improving, partly as a result of energy price cuts and other bill freezes announced at the Budget. The cost of borrowing was lower than expected. The headroom on her fiscal rule was up slightly, from £21.7bn to £23.6bn.
The improvement in this fiscal headroom reduces media speculation about future tax rises, which allows for a more stable investment environment, which allows for stronger growth. It can help create a benign cycle of boredom and national interest.
Of course, there is plenty which could still blow it all off course. As Reeves spoke, the missiles rained down on the Middle East. The Trump administration has unleashed a war of chaos and impenetrable aims which could overshadow any of her economic calculations.
Even if it settles quickly, there will always be another crisis to manage from Washington – an attack on Cuba, or a new tariff war, or whatever else the Maga extremists dream up as a way of giving their lives purpose.
But such matters are, for now, out of the Chancellor’s hands. The Office of Budget Responsibility finished its calculations before the latest hostilities began. All she could work with was what she had in front of her.
The Chancellor is far from perfect. She has created many of the problems she has spent the last year solving. She has shown insufficient bravery and insufficient vision. But she deserves credit for remembering the original promise that Labour made when it returned to power: that this country deserves a boring competent government. And that was precisely what we got a glimmer of today. More of this, please.
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