After Reeves’s historic budget, Labour has time to pursue its revolution. What it needs now is public trust | Martin Kettle

The government is operating in an unforgiving time and lacks capital with voters. It will be crucial to address that

Rachel Reeves is the third Labour chancellor of the exchequer to be an MP in my home city. In earlier times, Hugh Gaitskell and Denis Healey both sat for Leeds seats too, as Reeves does today. Their budgets, like hers this week, were delivered in challenging, though extremely different, economic times.

Both these Labour predecessors, however, would unhesitatingly have recognised Reeves’s 2024 budget as what it is. It is a budget in the identifiably social democratic Labour tradition to which Gaitskell and Healey also belonged. It is a tradition qualitatively different from that of even the most progressive Conservative chancellor.

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After Reeves’s historic budget, Labour has time to pursue its revolution. What it needs now is public trust | Martin Kettle

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Related

The US election interference row tells us this: Starmer’s political compass urgently needs resetting | Martin Kettle

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