How Rachel Reeves is borrowing from George Osborne’s playbook

Labour’s revenge is sweet, and ice-cold. It is 14 years since George Osborne, the chancellor, persuaded a lot of people that Labour had crashed the economy and that it would take time for the Conservatives to put it right. Now it is Rachel Reeves’s turn for Labour.

In 2010, the Labour Party was supine, electing Ed Miliband as leader with the unspoken slogan, “The Labour government was terrible; vote Labour.”

The party allowed the Tories to peddle a version of recent history that was almost the opposite of the truth, which was that Gordon Brown saved the banks. Brown’s slip of the tongue – claiming to have “saved the world” – was more true than the Osborne version. By saving the banks, Brown stabilised a credit crunch that could have turned into a depression that would have cost millions of jobs; and he helped coordinate global action to do the same elsewhere.

Yet Osborne sold a story of a reckless Labour government that had overspent, failed to “fix the roof while the sun was shining” and bequeathed to him a broken economy that would take at least five years to mend.

Now Labour is engaged in an equal and opposite sleight of hand. Reeves, the new chancellor, is selling a story of a reckless Tory government that tried to make unfunded tax cuts, failed to “fix the foundations” and bequeathed to her a broken economy that will take at least five years to mend.

“They did it to us” is the cry of those seeking vengeance through the years. It doesn’t make it right, but it levels the score. The public finances are in a terrible state, mainly for reasons that were outside the Tory government’s control: coronavirus and the energy price shock. It could be argued that the Tories chose to respond to the pandemic by shutting down the economy and borrowing vast sums to keep people in jobs – but those were decisions that Labour supported, usually arguing that the government should have gone further.

The one thing that was the Tory party’s fault was Liz Truss blowing up the chemistry lab, which is why her name featured so much in Labour propaganda during the election and will no doubt continue to feature over the next few years. But Truss’s mini-Budget was quickly reversed, and the chemistry lab was soon refurbished and found to have suffered only superficial damage.

Some people blame her for the cost of their mortgages going up, but interest rates were rising anyway.

Yet the Conservatives have already lost control of their own story. Rishi Sunak’s decision to call an early election will be argued over for ever, but one of the things it did was to confirm in people’s minds that the Tories had lost confidence in their ability to turn the country round and were dashing to the polls before things could get any worse.

Meanwhile, Milibandism has taken over the Tory party’s soul. The message has been: “The Tory government was terrible; we are very sorry.” Even before a single vote was cast the Tory postmortem was complete: “We put taxes up to record levels and tripled immigration; what did we expect?” Suella Braverman, the former home secretary responsible for building prisons, said on Friday that “not building enough prisons” was one of “the things we shamefully left undone”.

Reeves led the way in telling this story, saying in her first speech as chancellor that she had instructed Treasury officials to tell her how bad the public finances are. (As if they would otherwise have pretended that all the independent forecasters had got it wrong.) Wes Streeting said that it is the “policy” of the new government that “the NHS is broken”.

This is mythmaking reminiscent of the Chinese communist party: that an opinion is the official government line. But it is not copied from totalitarian Beijing; it is copied from politburo secretary Osborne.

What Labour has learned from Osborne is that the meaning of an election is shaped after the votes are cast as much as it is before. The 2010 election was not a mandate for what became known as austerity. Before the election, David Cameron and Osborne were nervous about promising to cut public spending, but afterwards, after Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats switched sides, they were able to make the case that the Labour government had left the public finances in such a state that they had no choice but to cut spending.

That is exactly what Keir Starmer and his cabinet are doing now, in reverse. Shabana Mahmood, the justice secretary, was explicit about it in her first speech on Friday: she didn’t want to let prisoners out early, and she accepted that there was a risk to the public, but the Tories had left the prisons in such a state that she had no choice.

Osborne’s strategy of blaming Labour and claiming to have a “long-term plan” to put things right sustained the Tory-led government and helped to deliver election victory five years later.

Labour hopes to do the same. It is defining the election as the moment that the voters accepted that the Tories have left the country in ruins and that it will take a long time to rebuild. It is assisted in this by Tory leadership contenders saying the same thing, and by a Tory membership who say that their government betrayed them and the country. It really is a mirror image of 2010-15.

Labour has finally got its own back.