Pity Rachel Reeves, the chancellor of the exchequer. Before she had even got through her highly anticipated “growth speech” on 29 January, criticism flooded social media and the airwaves. Her approach is too scattered, some said, and too reliant on measures whose impact will be felt only over the long term. Some programmes run counter to the government’s environmental commitments, others said, and they are not evenly distributed across the UK. It is all too expensive. The Ryanair chief executive, Michael O’Leary, even went so far as to declare publicly that Reeves “hasn’t a clue”.
Don’t get me wrong: the speech was not perfect. But perfection is not possible under the UK’s current economic and financial conditions, and to pursue an elusive optimum would be to make the perfect the enemy of the good. Moreover, Reeves’s speech did succeed in five areas.
