Andy Burnham just made a shocking decision – he’ll trigger a full-blown Labour revolt | Personal Finance | Finance
I’ve spent the last two years pulling apart Reeves’s disastrous tenure at Number 11, and it’s been a piece of cake. Fury boiled naturally inside me as she made one calamitous error after another, then droned on about how brilliantly it was all going. I was flabbergasted when she axed the winter fuel payment for 10 million pensioners, in a bid to show she could make “tough decisions”. Within seconds, I’d worked out this involved snatching up to £200 a year from single pensioners on as little as £11,343 a year, and the country wouldn’t stand for it. Why hadn’t she?
That set the tone for all that followed. The family farms and small business inheritance tax raids were a disgraceful assault on some of the hardest-working people in the country. Hiking employers’ National Insurance by £25billion – known as a “jobs tax” – crushed business margins and drove up unemployment. Anyone tempted to pity Reeves should remember that her decisions have robbed hundreds of thousands of their livelihoods, and that she has never shown a shred of remorse or recognition.
Her first Budget was bad, breaking manifesto pledges and hitting us with £40 billion in tax. The second was an even bigger shambles, including her humiliating U-turn on income tax and another £26 billion on our tax bills. As growth slowed while the debt and deficit soared, Reeves repeatedly claimed she had “restored stability” and “fixed the foundations” of the economy, and it just was not true. And don’t get me started on her CV and those freebies.
She was at it again yesterday, writing in a post on X that “the economy today is stronger, fairer and more resilient because of the choices we have taken as a Labour Government over the past two years. Stability restored, investment delivered and reform to our economy under way.”
Reeves even had the cheek to say that she’d judge her time in office a success if the lives of ordinary working-class people had been improved. I’m proud to say that they have. How did she do that, exactly? By extending the tax threshold freeze? Hiking taxes on personal savings? Wrecking the jobs market? Killing economic growth? I just don’t see it. Here are eight ways she’s made our finances worse.
And now she’s gone. Fired by new PM Andy Burnham, and hurrah for that. But I’m genuinely shocked because his bombshell pick, John Healey, has all the markings of being competent. A Westminster veteran and former Treasury minister who understands finance and doesn’t go in for empty grandstanding. I didn’t expect that from a Labour Chancellor.
But Healey faces a massive problem. It’s called The Labour Party. Burnham has to marshal 403 mostly left-wing MPs who don’t care about financial competence and fiscal rules, but want to borrow and spend like there’s no tomorrow. They’d much rather have Ed Miliband chucking money at pet Leftie projects and starting pointless rows with Donald Trump. They’ll dismiss Healey as a right-wing shill, and the revolt against Burnham will begin. Judging by the Leftie websites I visit, it already has.
Burnham also shocked me by keeping Shabana Mahmood as Home Secretary. She may not have stopped the boats, but she’s the only Labour politician who’s ever likely to try. Labour MPs are already in revolt against her, so it’s a brave move by Burnham. In appointing these two, he’s sent a message that the rest of the Labour Party and wider left will hate. And they’ll be after his blood. Burnham’s popularity won’t last. Ironically, the Labour Party is turning against him first. And on his first day in the job.
