I WAS amused this week to see Labour’s Rachel Reeves trying to portray herself as the next Margaret Thatcher.
Wasn’t it just a few years ago that the Shadow Chancellor was knocking on doors, delivering leaflets and persuading people that the socialist Jeremy Corbyn should be in No 10?
Keir Starmer himself served in Corbyn’s Shadow Cabinet — defending his blocking of Brexit, his open-door immigration proposals, and his determination to take the UK back to the 1970s.
These days, Sir Flip Flop pretends to be the opposite of a socialist, a true blue Thatcherite.
It says all you need to know about the desperation of the Labour Party that they have to pick a Conservative Party icon on the economy — because they have none of their own.
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Well, I’m flattered that Labour is pretending to be Conservative to woo voters.
But I’m not fooled, and I don’t think Sun on Sunday readers will be either.
Hypocrisy aside, Reeves’s self-portrait as Thatcher really is a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
Because at the heart of Labour’s plans for the economy lie two fundamentally dangerous policies.
The first is their New Deal For Working People — a great big ruse to hand back power to the unions, who are coincidentally Labour’s biggest donors.
It would mean a wave of new red tape for business, holding them back with huge extra costs, and would ultimately backfire on the workers themselves.
Don’t take my word for it — businesses up and down the country are worried.
The Institute of Directors said that Labour’s new deal for workers could place “very significant costs on businesses” and risk making British businesses “uncompetitive”.
The Confederation of British Industry said there is a risk the policies could “adversely affect their ability to grow and take on new staff”.
Employment law firm Osborne & Wise said that it “will inevitably come at a significant operational financial cost, and many employers will have to engage with trade unions for the first time.”
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In short, their wheeze would deal a killer blow to British jobs and British competitiveness.
No one — Margaret Thatcher least of all — would think that strikes saddling Britain’s economy and putting us in the slow lane is a good model for growth.
This is the week that we’ve seen huge progress in reducing inflation and the cost of living.
Killer blow
That’s all thanks to Rishi Sunak taking tough decisions on the economy and not giving in to militant unions and their unreasonable demands.
Are Labour really asking the country to undo all that good work, give the trade unions more power and put them at the heart of our economy?
The second dangerous policy is Labour’s £28billion green splurge.
They’ve tried to row back on the price tag but their targets are still the same.
And all the while, they have no plan to pay for them.
What it would ultimately mean is more spending, more borrowing and higher taxes.
None of those things sound like Margaret Thatcher to me.
The thing that most struck me about Rachel Reeves’s big economic speech is that it contained no new ideas.
They have no plan for productivity and no plan for growth.
With the few policy proposals they have put forward, they can’t even explain how they would pay for them.
While they’ve been standing on the sidelines sniping, it’s been this Conservative government that has steadied the ship after two big global shocks — the Covid pandemic and Putin’s illegal war in Ukraine.
Hiking taxes
We’re putting £900 back into the pocket of the average worker, and cutting taxes on business to get our economy booming.
We’re incentivising people to invest in Britain, while also reducing costs on households by removing unnecessary levies on motorists and taking advantage of the natural resources in our back yard, including oil and gas in the North Sea.
That’s because we understand that the public — like Sun on Sunday readers — want a sensible, pragmatic government to work in their interests.
Not in the interests of union barons or green ideologues.
We also know that you cannot create growth by hiking taxes and regulating more.
Dynamism in our economy comes from the determination of people who work hard, innovate and take risks.
That’s why we must stop Labour from getting into power.
Because as Maggie herself said, Labour have the unfortunate “socialist disease” — they always “run out of other people’s money”.
