Rachel Reeves' Labour Conference speech: Can she "turn the page" on donor-gate?

By The News Agents

The Chancellor’s speech at the Labour Party Conference in Liverpool contained much of the same messaging we’ve heard recently from the party - tough decisions because of a bleak economic inheritance.

Read time: 2 minutes

In brief…

• Rachel Reeves addressed Labour Party members in a speech at the party conference in Liverpool on Monday.
• She defended her move to means-test the winter fuel allowance and vowed not to return the country to austerity.
• The speech was interrupted by a heckler, while nurses rejected her pay deal just as she was wrapping up.

What’s the story?

Chancellor Rachel Reeves has defended the unpopular decision to cut the winter fuel allowance, despite vowing not to “return to austerity”, in her first speech at the Labour Party Conference in Liverpool.

Reeves repeated the same messaging Labour has been churning out since it got into power - that it will have to make “tough decisions” because of the set of bleak economic circumstances it inherited from the Tories.

One of these was cutting the winter fuel allowance for some pensioners.

Defending the move, she said: “I know not everyone in this hall and in this country will agree with every decision I make…But I won’t make them for expediency nor for political advantage…it was the right decision for the circumstances we inherited.”

But despite this, Reeves vowed that “there will be no return to austerity” under Labour.

She added: “Yes, we must deal with the Tory legacy, and that means tough decisions, but I won’t let that dim our ambition for Britain.”

What else did Reeves say?

The Chancellor claims that growth and investment are what will lift the country out of its current economic situation.

And once the economy is growing again, the wealth will be shared around the country, she said.

Reeves told the conference hall: “You will see in your town or your city a sight that we have not seen often enough in our country.

“Shovels in the ground, cranes in the sky, the sounds and the sight of the future arriving. We will make that a reality.“Wealth created and wealth shared in every part of Britain, that is the Britain we’re building, that is the Britain I believe in.”

How exactly this may come about could be revealed in Labour’s plans for a new industrial strategy for Britain, which Reeves promised to unveil next month.

WIthin it, Reeves said there will be no trickle down economics, the era of which she said is over.

What else happened during the speech?

Perhaps the most exciting aspects of the speech were things Reeves herself didn’t say.

Early on, she was interrupted by a heckler who shouted about the sale of arms to Israel before he was removed from the hall by security.

Towards the end of her speech,, a story broke about how nurses across the country rejected a pay deal of a 5.5% pay rise offered by Reeves. It came just as she was hailing the government's approach to ending the strikes.

The News Agents take

The News Agents were on the conference floor for the Chancellor's conference speech and noted how the main aim for Reeves was to attempt to "turn the page" on what' Lewis calls "a pretty torpid week of headlines that have been relentless on donor gate, ticket gate, whatever you want to call it".

“They know it’s been damaging”, Lewis says.

But while the initial question from Reeves' speech was whether they could turn the page, the second and more important one, he believes is: “what is this Labour government about and where is it taking us?”

However, it's hard to move the conversation on when it appears there's nothing new for Reeves to talk about.

"It was a speech she could have made last year... and very possibly did," Emily says on today's podcast.

"There were very few revelations as we’re still waiting for the budget that will come in a month’s time and so she’s slightly hamstrung by how much she can spell out."

The void of having anything new to discuss is partly why 'donor-gate' has dominated headlines, Lewis thinks.

“After an initial couple of weeks of flurry of activity, they went into summer recess."

And the biggest problem?

"There’s not been a summer budget," he adds. "I think this has been the biggest strategic mistake of this government so far."

"The problem with not having a summer budget meant that the winter fuel payment was seen in isolation and been the only thing people have been talking about for weeks.

And it also meant their government didn’t capitalise on the early momentum of coming into office."

Emily agrees, noting that there's nothing for the public to get excited about.

“There’s nothing to get excited about in actual tangible terms. All you've got is somebody saying 'delay your gratification - it’ll all be fine. Hang on another five weeks'. And hang on another five weeks is a frustrating and boring thing to tell a country.”

Listen to today's episode to hear The News Agents at the Labour conference.

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