Rachel Reeves thinks she’s weathered the storm but worst is to come | Personal Finance | Finance

Reeves has got her dream job and don’t we know it. She’s just given a jolly interview on a train to a journalist, where she shrugs off all the criticism that’s been fired her way. While pensioners, farmers and businesses rage, Reeves is clearly enjoying her time in power.

After 14 years toiling as an opposition MP, she declares herself “happy to take the brickbats”.

Reeves is certainly happier than millions of pensioners who have lost their Winter Fuel Payment.

She’s got more to smile about than the nation’s farmers, who face having to sell their land thanks to her cruel inheritance tax raid.

And she’s got more reasons to be cheerful than small business owners who face unaffordable inheritance tax bills running into tens of millions when a family member dies.

Not to mention the estimated 125,000 workers who will lose their jobs as employers wilt under her £25billion national insurance raid.

Reeves is a lot happier than the bond market, which is watching sceptically as she prepares to tap them for a staggering £300billion next year.

She even felt able to chortle about depriving her own elderly mother of the Winter Fuel Payment, according to Mail Online.

Reeves said her parents can afford to lose the money. “I don’t think it’s right that my mum and dad got the Winter Fuel Payment.”

She’s probably right. I’m sure they can afford it. They’re former teachers and have good pensions.

But as Age UK has pointed out, two million of the poorest pensioners have now lost vital cash worth up to £300 this winter. They can’t afford it.

Funnily enough, Reeves doesn’t mention them during her cosy chat. Just as she doesn’t mention family farms and businesses.

She does mention her disastrous NI raid, to be fair, but like everything else blames it entirely on instability left by the Tories.

Reeves said that’s why businesses backed Labour at the election, “because they saw me and they saw this changed Labour Party as the best route to restoring economic stability, and that’s what we’ve done”.

Business may have thought that before the election. They don’t think that now. And the idea that she has restored economic stability is nonsense.

Stability was slowly returning after the cost-of-living crisis and Liz Truss fiasco, with the economy growing 1.2% in the first six months of the year.

That shrank to just 0.1% in the first three months under Labour. In September, GDP actually shrank by 0.1%.

That’s not stability. That’s decline. And Reeves and PM Keir Starmer triggered it, by talking down the economy and threatening a brutal Budget.

One forecaster after another is slashing growth forecasts, risking another recession.

And when all those Budget tax hikes kick in next March, I think we’ll get one.