Rachel Reeves will be expecting an easier ride (Image: Getty/PA)
I reckon spent this morning with her eyes closed, hands clasped together as she knelt, praying for an reduction from the .
Scratch that, she’s more likely to have been sticking pins into a voodoo doll resembling her Labour predecessor , the man who told the bank it can do what it wants as long as it aims for 2% inflation.
After all, how much more tolerable life would be for Reeves if she could just tell Governor Andrew Bailey to cut . How much more convincing her clarion calls of economic exuberance would sound if she could follow them up with some actual good news.
It’d appear in far better taste to have the Chancellor claiming the Britain is on the up if she was telling it to home-owners to whom she was granting relief.
Perhaps those in rented accommodation could not be offended by her smiles if their buy-to-let landlords lost their excuse for rental price increases.
People with credit card debt might be a little lighter on their feet, feeling like there might be an end to the abusive barrage to which they’ve been subjected in recent years.
Andrew Bailey and the Monetary Policy Committee have cut interest rates (Image: PA)
In the end, Reeves got what she wanted. So some might think it’s a good day for a clearly struggling Chancellor.
But to say this is a sticking plaster holding together her political reputation would be to vastly overestimate this decision while underestimating the British people.
We’re not stupid, we know the Labour Government has no say over what the Bank of England does to its base rate. Any economic improvement will be credited to the people who really have power in this decision — those who sit on the Monetary Policy Committee.
Reeves on the other hand still has to bet that an ever-elusive third runway at will materialise. She also has to hope we’ll forget that it was her Government that told the population its economy was in the toilet.
Ah, but that was the fault of the . We have Labour now. And they’re fixing it. How, exactly? By hiking Employer National Insurance? How are workers supposed to benefit from their employers penny-pinching to pay the new rate? What about raiding the pockets of dead soldiers? Will that fix the economy? No.
The primary problem for Rachel Reeves is that voters remember her pronouncements of doom when Labour entered office. And many know why she did it. It wasn’t because she was genuinely shocked by Tory governance and the state in which they left the economy (in the first half of 2024 we had the fastest-growing economy in the G7). She did it to hit us with tax rises.
So although a cut in is welcome, Rachel Reeves should not benefit from a boost to the country’s morale. Her smiles should not scorch from our memory her previous grim-faced pronouncements. Remember why she did it — she did it to take your money. And she doesn’t want you to realise that today she’s given you nothing back.