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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Business
William Keegan

Britain didn’t vote Labour just to get a new iron chancellor

Rachel Reeves at a podium giving a speech, with a red backdrop bearing the words 'Fixing the foundations', and flanked on both sides by flags
Reeves: a return to ‘household economics’. Photograph: Lucy North/PA

Can somebody please tell the Labour party that they won the election? Most people I know are relieved and delighted that the Conservatives have got their comeuppance; but the relief that Labour is finally back in office is tempered by apprehension that the spectre of Philip Snowden is haunting them all these years later.

An iron – Labour – chancellor almost 100 years before Rachel Reeves (briefly in 1924 and then between 1929 and 1931), Snowden, after early popularity with the party and the trade unions, became a victim of the “Treasury view” of the day: balance the budget at all costs, rather than balance the economy.

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