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.
