Rachel Reeves and Dishonesty

The Chancellor might have delivered a budget that won wide support among the wealthy and, crucially, has done nothing to upset the class settlement bequeathed Labour. But you can't please all of the people-who-matter all of the time, and the knives are out for Rachel Reeves. Not so much in her own party, but a section of the media would like her scalp. And today, it's the BBC's turn to have a pop.

In November, Guido ran several stories picked up by the media about how Reeves had "massaged" her CV prior to entering the Commons. The right had fun exposing her claim that she worked as an economist for HBOS as bogus and delighted in reporting that Reeves was actually a manager of a retail banking complaints team. Thursday's BBC report looks into her career further, finding that Reeves also exaggerated the amount of time she worked at the Bank of England. Having previously said on several occasions that she'd worked there for a decade or the "best part of a decade", her BoE period was actually five-and-a-half years. Shorter than the six Reeves had put on her LinkedIn profile. Potentially more serious are allegations that while at HBOS she and her colleagues were accused of fiddling expenses by signing off on each other's claims. This was no idle tittle-tattle - it resulted in an investigation in which dozens of pages of evidence was submitted. This was, apparently, to "fund a lifestyle". The submission was compelling enough for the Internal Audit department to conclude there was enough evidence of "wrongdoing" and was referred to the next stage of the process. But there the investigation stalled and Reeves was not interviewed, which was at odds with procedure. Reeves left afterwards but there's no evidence this was because of the allegations. Indeed, the BBC report indicates she was not aware that a suspicious eye had been cast in her direction, and far from leaving under a cloud HBOS allowed her use of a company car for a further six months beyond the end of her contract. Also, in the interests of accuracy, it does appear that spending the bank's money on gifts for subordinates and superiors was part of the works culture. Her infractions were not that she'd done wrong per se, but that the cash was splashed a little too readily.

Considering Covid procurement and how Boris Johnson normalised institutional corruption during his tenure, Reeves palming a few gifts here and there before she was an MP is the smallest of beers. But that isn't to say this doesn't matter, because with the Chancellor it fits a pattern of behaviour. She's lied about her career, lied about political opponents, and has lied about her latest book - which is full of other people's work. Her political approach to matters economic is an exercise in deceit, and her elevation to Number 11 is off the back of the most dishonest Labour leader since ... forever. Reeves, Keir Starmer, and the rest of the lying bunch are well suited to one another. And will undoubtedly come undone together too.

Let's not kid ourselves that those having a pop at Reeves are motivated by ethics in political life. It's interesting that the BBC decided to publish their expose on the day the revised growth figures for the last quarter were published. News that was expected to be bad but were, in fact, just about positive. An attempted hit job you might say. But why when Starmer and friends have done everything to bend over backwards for capital? It's still worth noting that while most of the British ruling class are on board the Starmerist project, such as it is, there are those who are not - a nexus of the disgruntled rich that parasite off labour intensive, landed and financialised interests. For this hyper class conscious section of British capital, whose views are usually amplified by the right wing press, Reeves has committed the deadly sin of taxing unearned income. Closing inheritance loop holes and increasing employers' NI contributions have shattered the taboo of looking in this direction for revenue raisers. And conceding improvements to workers' rights, as watered down these commitments have become, opens the door to a slight tilt against capital's collective class interests. For them, at a minimum Labour need curbing to ensure they don't go any further down this road. What they perceive today as a slightly edging out of their interests is extrapolated forward to further grabs at the expense of their wealth and class power. If preventing this means destabilising a fundamentally weak government by blowing up low level misdemeanours into full on felonies, this is among the least of what they'll do.

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