Rachel Reeves has peddled so many lies in the past 18 months that, increasingly, no one – not the voters, the markets or even her own Cabinet colleagues – believes a word she says.
Every time I look at the Chancellor, a poem by the Edwardian writer Hilaire Belloc pops into my head: ‘Matilda told such dreadful lies, it made one gasp and stretch one’s eyes.’
Matilda suffers a terrible fate: her house burns down, with her inside, and no one comes to save her. ‘For every time she shouted “Fire!”, they only answered: “Little liar!”’
Now Rachel Reeves’ career is similarly going up in flames – and the blaze will almost certainly consume her boss, Sir Keir Starmer.
To those unversed in the most sinister techniques of the Left, it might seem inexplicable that Reeves repeatedly makes claims that end up being roundly disproved. To pretend there was a Budget shortfall of more than £20billion, when the Office for Budget Responsibility was pointing to a surplus of more than £4billion, is worse than wilful fantasy – it was delusional, immoral and potentially unlawful.
But I suspect she simply cannot help herself. She’s barely aware she is doing it. Her dishonesty over the Budget was not a mere lie of convenience – the sort that US President Donald Trump habitually tells to make the facts suit himself.
Instead, Reeves’ lies are rooted in the truest doctrines of the Left. She, like far too many socialists, believes in telling people what she considers good for them in the service of a higher aim. The question of factual accuracy is of secondary concern.
This authoritarian idea can be traced back to Ancient Greece and the philosopher Plato, who wrote of the ‘noble lie’ – the notion that some people were created from base metal, while others sprang from purest gold. This myth justified a social structure where aristocrats ruled over slaves.
Plato knew it was nonsense. But he insisted the lie was justified, because it enabled a small group of people who ‘knew best’ to control and tame the masses.
George Orwell reflected the same mindset in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which the totalitarian government bullies the ‘proles’ into believing whatever they are told. When Big Brother declares that 2 + 2 = 5, any heretic who argues that the real answer is 4 must be subjected to re-education – and eliminated if they don’t see sense.
This attitude is deeply ingrained in the arrogant Left in a way few people who do not have first-hand experience of it understand.
I first encountered it as a 1960s idealist, a student radical with an intense urge to defend justice and democracy. My family were refugees from communist Hungary and, while I loathed the Soviet system, I believed Marxism was the surest recipe for a fairer world.
By the 1980s, I was chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party, though I argued constantly with my fellow radicals because, unlike the rest of the Left, I was libertarian by nature and opposed to state control.
I also felt deeply suspicious of the welfare state, which ought to be a safety net for those who need help but had become a trap from which millions struggled to escape.
I always remember sitting in a pub with some friends from the Left, on the night after the General Election in 1983, when Labour (under the hard-Left leadership of Michael Foot and Anthony Wedgwood Benn) was trounced by Margaret Thatcher’s Tories.
Obviously, I deplored the result but – as I pointed out to my Left-wing friends – at least we lived in a democracy, where the working classes were free to vote for the people they wanted.
My comrades were aghast. ‘You don’t mean that!’ said one. Democracy was a disaster, they told me, because the people could never be trusted to make the ‘right’ choices. The same attitude underlies all Left-wing parties, including the Greens. Eco-activists think they have the right to shut down airports, block roads and even prevent ambulances from getting to hospitals, because their political ideals outweigh those of everyone else.
Starmer came into power claiming, absurdly, that his government would ‘tread lightly’ on people’s lives. Instead, his actions have proved beyond doubt that he – and Reeves – are not democrats. They are rigid and rather intolerant authoritarians, willing to tell whatever lies are necessary to wield and sustain their own power.
But what they cannot understand – and what the Left has always failed to grasp – is that the British will never forgive a liar. Once trust is lost, it’s gone for ever.
Readers will be all too aware of the extraordinary contempt for the truth that the Chancellor has shown throughout her career.
When she first moved into 11 Downing Street, headlines hailed her as a former child chess prodigy and tournament star. The BBC’s wide-eyed economics editor Faisal Islam called her a ‘junior chess champion’.
It’s true that she did compete in the British under-12s championship in 1990. She came 19th. The following years saw her placed 29th and 26th. Not quite a prodigy, and certainly not a champion.
Worse, she claimed to have worked at the Bank of England for a decade, when in truth she was there for less than six years, and was studying at the London School of Economics for some of that time.
She also described her role at Halifax Bank of Scotland as ‘an economist’. In fact, she was head of a customer relations department that dealt with mortgage retentions and complaints.
Her punishment for that particular lie was the nickname ‘Rachel from Accounts’, which she inevitably decries as ‘sexist’. But it should have meant automatic disqualification from elected office.
In the past few weeks, we have witnessed Reeves’ estrangement from the truth again as she blamed everyone but herself for her failure to apply for the mandatory landlord’s licence before leasing her family home in south London. She claimed she had not been told of the need to obtain the licence, when in reality she had been informed about it multiple times.
To me, it’s abundantly clear that Reeves has no proper awareness of the gulf between right and wrong, truth and falsehood – at least not when it comes to dealing with her voters. Lying has no moral connotations for her.
And because she does it so badly, her ineptitude is obvious to the whole world.
Starmer, for his part, hasn’t had to lie about his own career, because as a lawyer he was markedly successful.
But as a politician, he has lied repeatedly – from his shapeshifting beliefs over the years to his claim that the Tories left a £22billion ‘black hole’ when no such thing existed.
Perhaps the biggest lie of all is this whopper: that Starmer and Reeves are in any way fit to run the country. And the more I look at them, the more I suspect they don’t even believe it themselves.
- Professor Frank Furedi is the director of the think-tank MCC Brussels
