The hollowness of Rachel Reeves’s dash for growth
Despite the chancellor’s boosterish rhetoric, Labour remains wedded to a miserabilist green agenda.

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If economic growth could be delivered through sheer incantation alone, then the British economy would be booming right now. I counted at least 50 uses of the word ‘growth’ in UK chancellor Rachel Reeves’s speech in Oxfordshire earlier today.
As we all know, the reason Reeves was under so much pressure to deliver this ‘growth’ speech was precisely because there is no growth to be found. The UK economy has flatlined since Labour took office in the summer, while consumer and business confidence has collapsed since Reeves’s autumn budget. Today’s highly anticipated speech was supposed to turn things around.
For much of the speech, the chancellor talked a good game. That Reeves promised to put her weight behind major infrastructure projects that have stalled under previous governments, from airport expansions to new towns to new homes, was welcome. (That said, many of the projects she listed had already been approved or were merely rebrands of past proposals.)
Reeves is certainly right that reforming planning and environmental rules will be critical to getting things built and kickstarting growth. As Lauren Smith argues today on spiked, we have become a world leader in bureaucratic inertia, making construction far more cumbersome, expensive and time-consuming in the UK than it is in comparable countries.
The trouble is, we still have no tangible evidence that suggests Reeves and her government are prepared to be as radical as some of the rhetoric suggests. Indeed, it stretches credibility to believe that a Labour Party that is so thoroughly enamoured with greenism, with safetyism, with regulation for regulation’s sake, is now going to deliver the exact opposite in a no-holds-barred dash for growth.
There was a telling moment when the chancellor said she was ‘genuinely shocked’ at the constant delays caused by the UK’s arcane planning system and the extraordinary power it gives to NIMBYs, environmentalists and anyone else who wants to block a building project. Clearly, she had not put much thought into this issue before she came into power. The modern Labour Party, after all, is the political wing of the public-sector bureaucrat, the north London lawyer and the middle-class activist. The ‘blockers’ Reeves took aim at are surely well represented at every CLP meeting. Right on cue, London’s Labour mayor, Sadiq Khan, immediately slammed Reeves for giving the green light to Heathrow expansion, citing climate and pollution concerns.
Reeves’s much-trailed announcement, that she would give her full backing to the expansion of London’s airports, had given many pro-growthers false hope. Last week, speaking at Davos, when discussing airport expansion, she insisted that growth must ‘trump other things’. Many understandably inferred from this that growth might finally start to ‘trump’ Labour’s stringent commitments to reduce carbon emissions, given that air travel is so frequently attacked by climate activists.
But the chancellor dashed any such hope in her speech today. ‘There is no trade-off between economic growth and Net Zero’, she intoned. ‘Net Zero is the industrial opportunity of the 21st century and Britain must lead the way.’ She then cited the upcoming publication of the UK’s next carbon budget as part of her strategy for green-driven growth, seemingly forgetting that the very purpose of these carbon budgets is to establish an upper limit on economic activity, in order to meet legally binding CO2 targets. The obvious contradiction clearly escaped her.
In truth, there isn’t only a trade-off between economic growth and Labour’s climate ambitions – you could go as far as to say they’re incompatible. The UK’s attempts to transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy, which Labour Net Zero secretary Ed Miliband has accelerated, has already pushed electricity prices for industry to the highest in the developed world. It has also made our electricity supplies far less reliable. Earlier this month, the National Grid came the closest it has been to blackouts in decades, as the UK was hit by a windless cold snap.
Far from spurring growth, Net Zero is leading to rapid deindustrialisation. The Zero Emissions Vehicle mandate is decimating the UK car industry, forcing Vauxhall to close its van factory in November, after 120 years of operations. Port Talbot, Britain’s largest steel plant, is to shed over 2,000 jobs, as it transitions to a greener, electric manufacturing process. Grangemouth, Scotland’s largest oil refinery, is to shutter under the combined weight of soaring energy costs, carbon taxes and Labour’s ban on new North Sea oil and gas licences. Unions representing workers in the fossil-fuel industry fear they will become the ‘miners of Net Zero’. A boom in green jobs to replace those supposedly ‘outdated’ ones was first promised by New Labour in the first decade of the century, it is not going to suddenly materialise on Reeves’s watch.
If Rachel Reeves really wants to take on the ‘blockers’ who are standing in the way of the UK’s prosperity, she could start by taking a look in the mirror.
Fraser Myers is deputy editor at spiked and host of the spiked podcast. Follow him on X: @FraserMyers.
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