Is Rachel Reeves’s headroom shrinking?
Coffee House Shots
The Spectator
4.4 • 2.1K Ratings
🗓️ 12 June 2025
⏱️ 13 minutes
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Summary
There were clear winners and losers in Rachel Reeves’s spending review yesterday but some of her announcements around capital spending and investment saw her dubbed the ‘Klarna Chancellor’ by LBC’s Nick Ferrari for her ‘buy now, pay later’ approach. Clearly trying to shake off the accusations of being ‘austerity-lite’, Labour point to longer term decisions made yesterday, such as over energy policy and infrastructure. But will voters see much benefit in the short-term? And, with the news today that Britain’s GDP shrank by 0.3% in April, will the decisions Rachel Reeves have to make only get harder before the October budget?
Lucy Dunn speaks to Michael Simmons and Claire Ainsley, former director of policy to Keir Starmer and now at the Progressive Policy Institute.
Produced by Patrick Gibbons.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
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| 0:37.4 | And remember, investment |
| 0:38.7 | involves risk. Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shots. I'm Lucy Dunn and today I'm joined |
| 0:47.4 | by Michael Simmons and Claire Ainsley, former Director of Policy to Keir Starmour and who is now |
| 0:51.7 | at the Progressive Policy Institute. Yesterday, Chancellor Rachel Reeves announced her spending review, including billions of |
| 0:57.4 | pounds of infrastructure spending as part of her mission to renew Britain before the next |
| 1:01.0 | election. |
| 1:02.0 | Labor will, however, have a challenge trying to convince voters of its commitment to its change |
| 1:05.4 | agenda amidst cuts to day-to-day spending. |
| 1:08.5 | And Reeves has already had to face off accusations that she as a Klarna |
| 1:12.3 | Chancellor, by now, pay later. But this morning there's also been some more unfortunate news |
| 1:17.3 | headed the Chancellor's way with the latest GDP figures. Michael, can you tell us a bit more about |
| 1:21.6 | what the ONES has said today? If anyone was listening to the podcast yesterday, we talked about |
| 1:26.7 | how if we got a few bad GDP readings in the run-up to the podcast yesterday, and we talked about how if we got a few bad GDP readings |
| 1:29.9 | in the run up to the sort of next big Rachel Reeves event, which is obviously the autumn |
| 1:34.8 | budget, then we might get into a situation where she has to come back for changes to her |
| 1:40.3 | spending plans, i.e. cuts or potentially tax rises. And that sort of seems to have already |
| 1:45.6 | started happening today. So we got the April GDP figure, which shows the economy contracted by |
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