The chancellor’s loudest critics want her held to account for the economy. Several of them spent a decade promising the one policy that, by the official watchdog’s own figures, did the deepest damage.
LONDON—With Sir Keir Starmer’s resignation clearing a path for Andy Burnham and the future of Rachel Reeves thrown into open question, the politicians who built their careers on Brexit have arrived at a pointed demand: someone must explain what went wrong with the British economy. They have a suspect in mind. It is not themselves.
The case against Rachel Reeves, as her critics press it, is that her tax rises have throttled growth. What the prosecution tends to leave out is that Britain’s official fiscal watchdog, the Office for Budget Responsibility, estimates Brexit will cut long-run productivity by 4 percent against a Britain that stayed in the European Union. That figure is the average of more than a dozen studies. It has not been revised.
The Case Against Rachel Reeves
Leading the prosecution is Nigel Farage, who did more than any living politician to deliver Brexit and now leads Reform UK in the polls. He has described the non-dom tax changes the chancellor extended as “a self induced act of financial stupidity,” and after her November budget he went on his GB News programme to call the whole thing a “socialist shambles.” Reform’s deputy leader, Richard Tice, said the chancellor was punishing ordinary workers with yet more tax.
What the prosecution does not dwell on is where a large share of those tax rises came from. The Centre for European Reform, running the OBR’s own numbers forward, found the 4 percent productivity loss has cost the public finances around 40 billion pounds a year. Its analyst argued that a good portion of the chancellor’s tax increases would have been unnecessary if the country had stayed in the bloc. The hole the chancellor has been taxing to fill, in other words, was dug in significant part by the men now demanding to know who dug it.
“Rachel from Accounts”
The campaign against the first woman to hold the office in its more than 800-year history has had a mascot phrase. Detractors took to calling her “Rachel from accounts,” a nickname that traces to her having once described a bank job as economist work when, The Times reported, it involved customer complaints and mortgage retention. The label stuck to a chancellor with A-levels in mathematics and further mathematics, a master’s in economics from the London School of Economics, and an earlier post at the Bank of England. A Labour MP, Peter Prinsley, called the nickname “misogynistic and deeply unprofessional.”
Reeves has said she is tired of being told how to do her own job, and that she will not let her critics undermine her character. Whether that resolve outlasts a change of prime minister is another matter. As Newswax has reported, Burnham’s allies expect him to take the leadership uncontested, and an incoming prime minister is under no obligation to keep the chancellor he inherits. For now, Rachel Reeves remains in post, and in the crosshairs.
Not every voice is calling for her head. As Burnham weighed his options this week, the financial commentator Bill Blain made the case for keeping her, arguing that the markets had judged her credible precisely because she was, in his words, “dull, boring and predictable,” exactly the qualities a bond market prizes. He also noted that the outlets now blaming the chancellor for the economy were, by and large, the same ones that once promised Brexit would pay for itself.
The demand itself stands undimmed. The architects of Brexit, having promised for a decade that leaving the European Union would set the British economy free, would now like the chancellor to account for why it has not been set free. They have studied the question with great care. They have settled on an answer. The answer is a woman who turned up in 2024, eight years after the referendum, and started filling the hole.
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