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You have to feel a bit sorry for the chancellor. Roughly four weeks ago, Rachel Reeves had come to the Commons to deliver her spring statement. A moderately upbeat picture of the nation’s finances that didn’t necessarily coincide with people’s lived experience. Still, it more or less did the trick. Bought her another six months until the autumn budget. Or so she thought.
Now, thanks to the orange manchild sociopath in the White House, her forecasts are in tatters. And Reeves can’t even begin to assess the damage because there is no end to the war in sight. In the best-case scenario, the economy might just be in intensive care. The worst doesn’t bear thinking about. A full-scale financial meltdown. There again, we don’t even know what the world will look like in the next few weeks, let alone the next six months.
The only comfort for Reeves is this isn’t personal. When it comes to war, Donald Trump has broken the habit of a lifetime and been genuinely inclusive. Equal opportunities. He’s not just happy to take the US down with him. He won’t rest until he’s also completely screwed over the rest of the world.
Every country gets to feel the aftershocks of his reckless dysfunctionality. It’s a war where everyone but The Donald gets to pay for his decision. A global regressive tax for the pleasure of the Americans voting Trump into the White House.
That still left the chancellor with some sorting out to do, mind. So on Tuesday lunchtime, Rachel came to the Commons to announce what contingency measures she had in mind if – when – things got even worse. No one for a minute believes there is a chance of things getting unexpectedly better. Since Brexit, it feels like we have been on a never-ending doom loop. Only it was an announcement without any announcements in it. More a holding operation.
On days like this, you get the feeling that the government really doesn’t know any more than the rest of us. That it also spends its time trying to analyse the president’s Truth Social posts and respond to them. A hopeless task because not even Trump knows what he is going to be doing in a few hours’ time, let alone a few days.
He is both winning the war and not winning it enough. He’s a one-man dialectician. Trying to second guess the mind, if you can call it that, of The Donald is an act of futility. To base a country’s economic future on it an act of existential despair.
But needs must. So Reeves began with the caveat that everything she was saying was subject to a health warning. If the war went on for a few months, we’d all be better off dying today. She then slipped into her finest yoga meditation voice. The one that puts you to sleep in seconds. All that was missing was some mystic pan pipes as background music. It was oddly soothing.
Everything was going to be just fine, she said, because the government had already taken the measures to keep us all safe and well. Think of the children who were benefiting from free breakfast clubs. Think of the families who would get help with the abolition of the hated two-child benefit cap. Every cabinet minister is now under orders to call the two-child benefit cap “hated”. Even though it had been government policy to keep it until recently. Still, the eyes began to close. And no one thought to ask what any of this had to do with energy prices.
We moved on. Reeves had spent a lot of time collaborating with our European allies. And she was pleased to report that they were also panicking. But nothing was off the table. We might drill for oil and gas in the North Sea. There again, we might not. And we were going big on nuclear. Sometime in the 2030s, if the country is still here.
She would work to stop price gouging and if the time came when she needed to offer targeted support, she would. The well-off should just see increased energy bills as their own Trump tariff. More would be revealed. Or not.
The shadow chancellor, Mel Stride, is always a delight in the Commons. Because he is so spectacularly out of his depth. Other shadow cabinet ministers try to conceal their hopelessness. Mel revels in his. Doesn’t care who sees his half-wittedness. His abject naivety. There’s so much that escapes him, it is almost endearing. You have to work quite hard to get the wrong end of quite so many sticks.
He has no idea the Tories were all in favour of the war that is crippling the economy. He has no idea it was the Tories who left the economy on its knees. He has no idea he was the work and pensions secretary who doubled the welfare bill. He has no idea.
At some point, though, Stride has made a deal with the devil. He has renounced everything he once held dear. Principles sacrificed to be Kemi’s right-hand man. A man of no qualities. Not so long ago, Mel was a passionate advocate of climate change and net zero. He went into schools to promote it. Now he just wants to drill, baby, drill.
He seems to think you can restart the flow of North Sea oil within days. He also seemed a bit put out that Reeves was proposing targeted rather than universal support. The Melster wants his fair share of any cash going. Why does it always go to the least well-off?
Other Tories appear to have given up on their shadow chancellor and the combative incompetence of Kemi’s team. Edward Leigh tried to reach a consensus. He appreciated it wasn’t easy for the government, but could we just have a commitment that oil and gas would be part of the mix? We could.
Jeremy Hunt has managed to throw off the stigma of failure and reinvent himself as an elder statesman. He would support targeted help. Reeves thanked him, pointing out that Liz Truss’s untargeted help had cost the country £78bn. Which the country was still paying for.
Curiously, not a single Reform or Green MP had bothered to turn up. Apparently, none of them are that bothered about one of the country’s biggest challenges. Still, that made Reeves’ job just a bit easier. She had done her bit. Everyone was still alive. World war three hadn’t started yet. Be thankful for small mercies.
