If Rachel Reeves doesn’t shoot down Ed Miliband it’s game over for her | Personal Finance | Finance
This is nothing personal. It’s all down to politics. Miliband is about to destroy her career and she can’t allow that to happen. Nor can the rest of us.
Because everything Reeves needs to do as chancellor, Miliband is dead against.
She needs to get him before he gets her.
Reeves has suffered blow after blow, the vast majority self-inflicted. She killed economic growth by rubbishing the UK economy and hitting businesses with £40 billion of Budget tax hikes. Then left UK finances on a knife edge by borrowing another £30billion.
Her stint at No 11 has cost the UK tens of billions in lost growth and higher interest charges on our spiralling national debt.
Belatedly, she’s woken up to the damage she’s inflicted, and the sheer wrongheadedness of her economic philosophy.
If she had any decency she’d resign. Obviously she’s not going to do that so she should do the next best thing and stick the knife into Ed Miliband instead.
While Reeves is a belated convert to the cause of economic growth, Miliband is working night and day to destroy it.
Like Reeves, everything Miliband has done since the election will crush UK growth. Unlike Reeves, he isn’t changing course.
Miliband thinks the UK should stop drilling for North Sea oil and gas now, to drive down our carbon emissions.
He doesn’t care that it will cost us billions in lost tax revenues, lost jobs and lost growth. Or that we can’t develop enough wind and solar power to plug the gap by 2030.
Or that he’ll leave us even more exposed to volatile imported energy prices and blackouts.
Miliband literally doesn’t care. So long as he can signal his green virtues to the world.
This is no way for a government minister to behave.
On Miliband’s watch, Scotland’s only oil refinery Grangemouth has shut. Oil city Aberdeen is in decline. The final blast furnace at Port Talbot steelworks in south Wales has gone
Vauxhall is closing its car factory in Luton. All due to his Net Zero fanaticism.
The Rosebank oil field, the biggest in the North Sea, has just been blocked by judges and its future hangs by a thread.
If Miliband is allowed to continue this madness, Shell may renew threats to quit the UK and list on the New York Stock Exchange instead.
Shell is the UK’s second biggest company. If it decamped, oil rival BP would probably follow. This can’t go on. Not if Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves want the economy to grow.
Reeves must use whatever leverage she has with Starmer to get Miliband out. The alternative is to see her career go the way of our remaining industries.
If she’s hesitating, she can console herself with this thought. Miliband would be much happier down his local art gallery, splattering masterpieces with red paint like the rest of his Net Zero buddies.
She’d be doing him a favour.
If it isn’t game over for Miliband then it’s game over for Reeves – and the UK economy. Friendship shouldn’t come into it.
